Life’s Little 


Pitfalls 
| A.Maude Royden. 











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By the Same Author 





Sex and Common Sense 
Prayer as a Force 
Political Christianity 
Beauty in Religion 

The Friendship of God 
Christ Triumphant 
Life’s Little Pitfalls 


Diese Li ETM EVE LiP ADS 





Life’s Little Pitfalls 


By } 
A. Maude Royden 


Author of ‘‘ Sex and Common Sense,”’ 
‘* Christ Triumphant,”’ etc. 


G.P. Putnam's Sons 
New York 8 London 
The Rnickerbocker Press 
1925 





Copyright, 1925 
by 
A. Maude Royden 





Made in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


YOuTH 

MIDDLE AGE 

OLD AGE 

On BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 
_ ON BEING A FAILURE . 

Easy WAYS OF BEING GOOD 
TEMPERAMENT 

LONELY PEOPLE . 


On SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 


On MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS . 


105 
124 


143 


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LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 





LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


YOUTH 


WE are always inclined to remind the young 

that the world is at a crisis in its history; 
that humanity is making a great choice; and that 
upon them a great deal depends. Of course it is 
true, but as a matter of fact, it is always true. 
Each crisis looks portentous, but it is not any 
more portentous than it always was. Every new 
generation has the chance of making the world 
over, and every new generation is faced with a 
great choice, and those words of Rupert Brooke 
which, applied to the world of 1914, come to us 
now with something almost of irony, have their 
immortal truth. It is always true when the 
young begin to grow up that— 


“Honour has come back as a king to earth, 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage, 
And nobleness walks in our ways again, 
And we have come into our heritage.” 


That seemed dramatically true in 1914. It does 
not seem quite so true of that particular year 


3 


4 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


now as it did then; but it zs true, always, and 
every generation ‘‘comes into its heritage,” and 
the young have it always in their power to bring 
honour again to earth, and nobleness to walk in 
all our ways. The world is always suffering, and 
suffering is a challenge to every generous spirit to 
try and find out why it is there and to put it right. 
The young do not love suffering. ‘They are right 
not to love it. There is something morbid in the 
delight in pain that sometimes grows upon one— 
I suppose from a kind of protective instinct— 
because there is so much pain in the world. But 
the healthy reaction, the revolt of the young 
‘against suffering, is right and beautiful and God- 
given. Suffering is a challenge bringing home to 
us the fact that something is wrong. Therefore 
to hate it, to rebel against it, and to seek to get 
rid of it, is right. 

But this generation has gone through a time 
of such intense suffering, and is still under the 
shadow of such suffering—for it is now eleven 
years since the war began, and the young ones 
of to-day were only eight, nine and ten years old 
then, so that the war is like a dark shadow rather 
than a fact—that it has altered their attitude 
and taken its toll of their vitality, and even those 
who were babies when the war began have the 
shadow of that war upon their spirits. Any 
schoolmistress or master will tell you that the 
children who were born during the period of the 


YOUTH 5 


war are paying the debt in their nerves, in the 
difficulty which they have in facing life; as well 
as those who were actually broken in the war. 
That debt we have to pay for a long time yet, 
or rather, let me say, they have to pay it. There 
is among the younger generation a sense of in- 
security, a sense of the shortness of life and the 
possibility of death which was foreign to the 
generation to which I belong, to whom the per- 
manence of things was far more obvious than 
their transience. In the youth of to-day there is 
a sense of the passing of life and the uncertainty 
of things which has always to be taken into ac- 
count when one is thinking of the way in which 
they look at life. It results in one of two ways 
of thought: either, because life is short, they say, 
“‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”’; or 
they say, ‘‘This debt of pain, this agony of suffer- 
ing, means that there is something tremendously 
wrong with the world, and that wrong it is for us 
to put right.”” I suppose the first attitude, ‘‘Let 
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”’ is very 
common. When I read the newspapers, I could 
think it was so common that there was no one 
who did not have it! The frivolity of the young 
people of to-day is the theme of every moralist 
and almost every journalist and preacher. After 
all, since after six years of so-called ‘‘peace,’’ the 
world is still upon the brink of war, and those 
people who believed that war was going to come 


6 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


to an end have proved mistaken, and the young 
have so little control over the mistakes that are 
made by elder people, they may well argue— 
‘Let us take what we can get! Let us enjoy 
ourselves! We can only be young once. Life 
may be long, but youth is short. Let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow we die.”’ 

I am almost inclined to say to those people, if 
you can do it, doit! If you can dowt. It is true 
that we have made the world, we elder ones, into 
a ghastly mess, and in the last ten or eleven years 
it has been the young people who have paid the 
price; the men who have never come back, or 
who have come back shattered; the girls who lost 
their mates in the war; the state of society into 
which the young are growing up, and which gives 
them a devastating sense of not being wanted. 
Is not that the worst wrong that can be done to 
young life—to make the young feel that they are 
not wanted? Young people who are just coming 
away from school, or from college, full of a gen- 
erous enthusiasm, full of dreams, sometimes 
fantastic dreams, and yet noble dreams, of what 
they will do in the world and for the world, are 
now suffering this great wrong. They find a 
world in which there is no room for them, a world 
in which they cannot even get work, let alone 
work in which they can find scope for their ideal- 
ism and their enthusiasm, a world in which it is a 
struggle to get a footing at all, .a world in which, 


YOUTH | 


instead of people being grateful for what you can 
do to serve it, you have to be grateful if you can 
get any kind of work at all. Those gifts which 
you were beginning to develop at school or at 
college, sometimes great gifts for original and 
creative work, the world does not seem to want. 
A young artist who does lovely creative work has 
instead to draw cheap drawings for fashion plates. 
A young musician who has begun to know what 
art is, who has something of that musical con- 
science which for years this country seemed to 
have lost, finds the world ruled by greedy com- 
mercial people, who care nothing for good art, 
but only want art that will pay, and who will not 
give him a chance unless he is prepared to sing 
cheap songs, and play bad music. 

It is the sense that the world does not want 
you or does not want the best of you, that is the 
real wrong done to the younger generation to-day. 
When such boys and girls realise—consciously 
or unconsciously—that the world does not really 
ask for their best, they will perhaps take what 
they can get and not be worried by any mad 
desire to reform, and to change, and to move the 
world. For indeed, it seems, the world does not 
move, and you waste your young life trying to 
move it. You might at least have got something 
for yourself, so that, when you were old, you could 
say, at any rate I enjoyed my life while I had it! 
When the young take that point of view, they 


8 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


may argue that it does no harm. They do not 
want to do anything very bad after all. Only 
just to be let alone and not worried with these 
everlasting problems which we elder people 
created for them, and now expect them to solve! 

If you can do that—but no! Even if you can 
do it, don’t do it! Because, you see, if you take 
life like that, live your own life and leave the 
world to go to hell in its own way—if you do that, 
your own life becomes cramped and small. It is 
not young, it is old, to think that you can hold 
so tightly the thing that you can snatch. That 
is not youth, and it is not the spirit of youth. 
Do not let us make you old before your time. If 
you hold on to anything too tight, it begins to 
wither. It is like holding a flower in too hot and 
close a hand. It withers. It would have lasted 
longer and given you greater pleasure if you had 
left it where it was growing, and loved it. So, 
if you take life itself, which is so fair and lovely, 
and hold it too greedily, and make your personal 
advantage of it, and your personal enjoyment, 
it begins to wither in your hands, and you say 
‘‘youth is short.’’ Yes, indeed, it is short, if you 
treat it like that—terribly short—for in a little 
while your interests contract, your vitality flags, 
you lose that generous enthusiasm which makes 
the world your workshop and your heritage. 
Living people must change. They cannot help 
it. They cannot stand still. So you must either 


YOUTH 9 


let your interests grow, or they will contract and 
narrow, and what seems so innocent and harmless - 
now—just to let the world go its own way and 
take what you can get—does not really, in the 
end, make either for happiness or for youth. 
You get stifled in that narrow little life of yours, 
which grows always narrower and narrower. 

Look abroad. What is your heritage? The 
world itself! The world is your heritage, and if 
you find a difficulty in establishing that, the 
fault is yours. Yes, yours. It is the fashion 
nowadays to speak of young and old as though 
they belonged to two different species. When I 
was working in the suffrage movement, people 
used to speak sometimes as though men and 
women: belonged to totally different species. 
Even that was less preposterous than the modern 
habit of spelling youth with a capital Y, and age 
with a capital A, and speaking as though they 
had no interests in common, no common human- 
ity, but were two absolutely different species, of 
which the one beginning with a Y was absolutely 
and perfectly good, and the one beginning with A 
hopelessly and irredeemably bad. 

That is not true and, because it is not true, 
it is a pity to go on believing it. It is true that 
the older generation partly inherited and partly 
made terrible mistakes. It is not true that they 
pushed on to the young the whole payment of the 
price. Younger brothers and sisters, it is gen- 


10 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


erally true that your parents love you better 
than you love them. That is not unnatural or 
wrong. The debt that you owe them you will 
repay to your own children. You also will love 
them more than they love you. Does that seem 
to you untrue? Well, do you know, Macdougal 
gives a very interesting example in his great work 
on Social Psychology. He reminds us that once 
in a great persecution in Rome it was noticed 
that many sons denounced their fathers, but xo 
father ever denounced his son. 

In the war, one of the most poignant tragedies 
was that of the older generation who saw those 
for whom they had sacrificed much, whom they 
had brought into the world, and to whom they 
had expected to hand on the torch of life, dying in 
their stead. Of how many of us older people is 
that not true? We had sons, nephews, friends, 
to whom we looked to go further, to carry the 
torch much further on, than we could hope to do. 
They are dead: and it is cheap, is it not, to say 
that one would rather have died than let them die? 
But sometimes it is true. 

I know of a family, a large family and most of 
them married, but only one had a child and all 
the hopes of that family were on that boy’s head. 
He went out and was killed. Can you imagine, 
you younger people, the sense of baffled and frus- 
trated love in the hearts of all those older ones? 
Do you not know it would have been easier for 


YOUTH II 


most of them to die than to let him die? If there 
was one person in all their family circle that they 
would not have sacrificed, it was he. Think of 
that saying of Rupert Brooke’s about the gift of 
the slain of their unborn children—‘‘Those who 
would have been their sons they gave, their im- 
mortality.” No one can read that without 
realising that it is the most poignant line in the 
whole sonnet. Their sons they gave—their un- 
born sons, their immortality. For it is immor- 
tality, in a sense, to hand on the torch of life to 
someone else. But to the impersonal sense of 
frustrated and baffled love which the younger 
man feels who has had no son is added in the case 
of parents the personal sense of loss of one already 
known and loved, so that the loss is doubled. Do 
not, in your resentment against the older world, 
forget that the older generation in spite of all, has 
paid in blood and agony for the mistakes it made. 

And you—you younger ones? These men, 
these Rupert Brookes, died not for us, but for 
you; for the old world they had no great love, 
but the new world—it was for that they died. 
You think we owe them a debt? Yes, but you 
owe them a much greater debt. For you they 
“poured out the red sweet wine of youth” and 
“laid the world aside,” and work, and joy, and 
‘“‘that serene that men call age.”” They gave it 
for the younger generation, and you are here and 
have your chance because of them. 


12 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


Well, but what a world! So indifferent, so 
despairing, so materialistic, so determined to go 
to war again, so indifferent it seerns, to the things 
that the noblest of the younger generation care 
about. Must you, then, repeat the mistakes of 
which you are complaining? If the world does 
not seem to want you, its real need is all the more. 
A world in which the younger generation has not 
got room to grow up, is a scandalously ill-arranged 
and suffering kind of world. Because we did not 
set it right, you are suffering. Well, but you 
must set it right, lest others have to suffer! If 
every younger generation as it grows up and finds 
the world slow to change (and God knows it is 
slow to change) derives from that merely a 
grudging resentment, and thinks, ‘“‘If the world 
won’t change, and treats us badly, we will just 
enjoy ourselves,’ then the world remains in this 
pit, and all those things which you resent against 
the older generation you are laying up for your 
children. You must change it, and I will tell you 
why. 

Because you alone can change it. In order to 
change the world, you must first believe that 
change is possible. But it is very difficult for 
older people to believe it. They too once tried 
to change it. They too once dreamed their 
dreams. And in one generation, in one lifetime, 
we do not see much change. We see so little 
that we begin to think, towards the end of our 


YOUTH 13 


lives, that change is impossible, and all those 
silly, worn-out tags of worldly wisdom—‘‘ You 
can’t change human nature,” and that sort of 
thing—seem true at last. We grow so terribly 
accustomed to failure, because so many blows 
have fallen upon us, so many disappointments 
have overtaken us, that at last it becomes almost 
impossible to believe that the world can greatly 
change. 

I remember just when the war broke out 
meeting Felix Moscheles, one of the world’s 
greatest workers for peace. He died shortly 
afterwards: I suppose the war killed him. I 
remember, when I took his hand, it felt cold and 
lifeless, and he looked almost as though the 
spirit in him had died already, for all his life’s 
work had apparently gone down for nothing in 
that hell. That which happened to him happens 
in lesser ways to all of us. We all have our 
hopes, and dreams, and ideals; and over and over 
again we fail, or—even worse—we succeed and 
find our success a caricature of the thing we hoped 
for. Sometimes I think the great reformers must 
almost wish they had not succeeded. They could 
have gone on dreaming of what success would be 
like, then; but when they have succeeded, actually 
succeeded, the ideal they loved is coarsened by 
realisation and warped by the compromises that 
had to be made. The thing that was to them a 
dream and a vision has become a caricature when 


14 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


seen in reality. You have not yet experienced 
that, or have not experienced it as the old have, 
and therefore, while there are some old who are 
young in spirit and still believe the world can 
change and will, there are far more who are young 
in years to whom that belief is their natural 
inheritance. You can believe the world will 
change, and your belief is just. You are right, 
and those who despair are wrong. Your faith is 
justified by reason. All the anticipations of all 
the pessimists in the world cannot hide the fact 
that the human race has gone forward, has gone 
amazingly forward, and if you look long enough 
you will see that those who died broken-hearted 
because their ideals seemed such a caricature 
when they were realised, were justified in the end. 
You, looking back, can see how great they really 
were and how wise. You can see that in spite 
of their faults and defects, their ideals did lift 
the world a little further along the road and make 
it possible for us to believe that the world can 
change and does. 

Do you remember how Robert Louis Stevenson 
said once when old people told him that when 
he was as old as they were he would think as 
they did—‘‘Very likely I shall, but that does not 
prove I shall be right!’’ Very likely you will 
think old thoughts when you are old in years. 
Very likely you too will say that the world cannot 
change; but that does not prove that you will be 


YOUTH 15 


right! No, it is now that you are right, now 
while you believe in great possibilities, in much 
greater possibilities than the world has dared to 
hope. There is no sense in saying “‘because things 
have always been so, they always will be so.” 
Your ideals may yet be nobly realised. Your 
hope may not, in realisation, prove a failure, a 
caricature. The fact that it has often been so 
is no proof whatever that it must be so, and 
there is at least rational ground for believing 
that, however slowly, the world does go forward, 
and that humanity rises slowly indeed, but cer- 
tainly. In the long-recorded ages of science we 
see that humanity evolving. 

Since you can believe this and older people 
often cannot, it is for you to do it. The world 
will not be changed by those who believe it 
cannot be changed. Such people may go on 
working, from a sad sense of duty, for a future 
in which they have ceased to believe; but it is those 
who believe who will bring it about, and since it 
is possible to you to believe, possible from the 
very fact that you have not been so bludgeoned 
as we older ones have been, the tools are to you. 
Use them. As long as you believe in the possi- 
bility of progress you are young; when you lose it 
you are old. For youth and age have nothing 
essentially to do with years. We are all immortal 
spirits. Whence do we come and what was our 
history before we came here? I do not know, 


16 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


but this I know: that faith in the possibilities of 
God, faith in the capacity of man to realise and to 
respond to a great ideal, is the very spirit of youth, 
whatever our mortal years, and as long as we 
have it our spirits are eternally young. It isa 
blasphemy against God to deny that the world 
can change. It is blasphemy against man to 
say that when he sees the highest he will not seek 
after it. Believe it, and go forward, for once 
believing it, you will not be able to say again, 
*‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” 
Inspiration will come to you which will teach 
you the very opposite of that: he that seeks to 
save his life is the one that loses it, and he that is 
willing to cast it away is the one to whom life 
comes ever more and more abundantly. 

You see the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming 
down from God out of heaven, prepared as a 
bride adorned for her husband, and you hear a 
great voice out of heaven, saying, “‘ The dwelling 
place of God is with men, and they shall be my 
people, and I will be their God.” 


MIDDLE AGE 


Ge). Lord never reached middle age, and I 

suppose that is, fundamentally, the reason 
why many people feel that middle age is rather 
dreary. It is because so many of the finest 
spirits died when they were young; so often that 
it has become a proverb to say ‘‘Those whom the 
gods love die young.’’ Our Lord himself, who 
might have been thirty-three—who could not, I 
believe, have been more than thirty-five or thirty- 
six—when he died, gives to those who love him 
an example and an inspiration at so many points 
of life, that to find that one cannot get from him 
the kind of guidance that one would desire at 
middle age makes us feel that it is better to be 
swept out of life before the process of growing 
old and losing the glamour and the glory of 
existence comes upon us. 

What is middle age? When do we begin to 
be middle-aged? For myself I can say that up 
to my present year I have found every year of 
my life more exciting than the year before, and 
the idea that there is something dreary and dull 
about middle age—wnecessarily dreary and dull— 
seems to me fundamentally mistaken. 

17 


18 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


After all, when we reach the watershed of life, 
which divides the growing up from the descent, 
we ought to have learned a great deal about our- 
selves. It has been said that a man of forty who 
is not able to act as his own doctor must be a fool. 
I do not think that is altogether true, but there 
is something in it. He ought to know by that 
time, more or less, what physically agrees with 
him, what he can eat without having indigestion, 
and how much he can eat, what holidays he needs, 
and so on. And forty is hardly middle-aged. 
Surely, then, by the time we are approaching 
fifty we ought to know something about our own 
personality! We ought to know, roughly speak- 
ing, what kind of people we are. 

Now one of the most harassing things about 
youth is our complete uncertainty as to what 
kind of a person we are. Whether one is very 
remarkable, extraordinarily good, or very com- 
monplace, or very bad is all uncertain. Personally 
I never could be at all certain, and I believe I 
generally hoped that I was the kind of person 
that I had just read about in some book—if it 
was an attractive person, a great saint, or a great 
adventurer, or somebody who had excelled in 
some role of life! Or perhaps somebody whose 
life was one long act of self-sacrifice of which 
nobody would ever know until after I was dead. 
It was most harassing, this uncertainty, because 

although there is a certain natural conceit in 


MIDDLE AGE 19 


young people (it zs natural, and nobody ought 
to be irritated by it) there is also a recurring 
sense of inferiority. Are your opinions yours, 
or have you simply accepted them from some- 
body else? Have your most cherished convic- 
tions been thrust upon you by somebody you 
specially admire, or by the circle in which you 
grew up, or by the tradition that was in your 
family? Those ideals in which you believe, are 
they really utterly foolish and unreal? Are they 
opinions which only very young and ignorant 
people could hold, or is there some truth in them? 
Perhaps before the world we put up a bluff of 
being absolutely certain—more certain than any- 
one ever could be!—and yet how often there comes 
into our minds a fear that perhaps we are only an 
empty shell with nothing really our own in it at 
all, and that neither our ideals, nor our principles, 
nor our convictions, nor even the virtues that the 
world ascribes to us, are really ours. 

What kind of people are we going to be? We 
make false starts, try to be all sorts of different 
people, and then find we cannot. We are not 
that sort of person at all, and there comes to us 
a terrible sense of failure. Life seems so short 
when one is very young. I can remember feeling 
that twenty-two (the august age to which one of 
my friends had attained) was very old, and that it 
really could not matter what happened to anyone 
after he was thirty. When one is young, how 


20 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


short life is, and how urgent it is that one should 
know the sort of person he wants to be and 
whether he has the capacity to be that person. 

When we are middle-aged, there is one great 
factor in our favour. We either know what sort 
of person we are, or at least we have the materials 
for knowing. Perhaps some day psychology 
will have reached a point of wisdom at which it 
will be able to help us while we are much, much 
younger, to guide our lives and to know the aim 
that we ought to set before us; for if there is one 
lesson that life teaches more than another I 
think it is this—that we must try to be the very 
best kind of person of the kind that we are, but 
that it is fatal to try to be some other kind. That 
lesson psychology is teaching us to-day—that 
we must be ourselves, we must devote ourselves 
to being the very best that is in us, we must carry 
the powers we have to their highest point; but 
we must not waste our time and strength in 
trying to be some other kind of person alto- 
gether. 

If, then, by the time you are middle-aged, 
you know what sort of person you are, how much 
more direct, how much more smooth, how much 
more sure your path can be in the future! In- 
stead of wasting your strength in a vain effort to 
be somebody quite different from any person 
that is implicit in you at all, you know now the 
sort of person that you are. You do not know 


MIDDLE AGE 21 


at all how greatly you may be that person. You 
do not know that, even when you are middle-aged. 
You do not know how far you may go along that 
path; but you do know what path it is. I am 
not speaking of one’s career. Sometimes that 
changes, even in middle age. But your tem- 
perament, your character, your psyche, you 
know that by now. Or if some of you do not 
yet know what kind of person you are, you have 
at least got the materials for knowing. You 
have lived—how long? Let us say fifty years. 
In fifty years you have made enough mistakes 
and achieved enough successes and followed your 
path in life sufficiently, with all your false starts, 
to know, if you choose, what kind of person you 
are, and while psychology is still in its present 
rather inchoate condition, that is something that 
we may be thankful for. Take stock of yourself. 
If you are discouraged, if you feel that middle 
age is rather dreary, if you would like to go back 
even to those false starts, since, after all they 
meant the possibility of a start, take stock of 
yourself. Why did you make all those mistakes? 
What are the obstacles that you were or are up 
against? Are they outside you, or are they within 
you? Have you chosen wrong? Is it possible 
for you to choose again? If it is not, what can 
you make of life where you are? You have all 
the material; the young, have not. They have 
to make their adventures and take their risks, 


22 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


because all their experience is before them; but 
you have got that experience. Set it down, even, 
if you like, on paper: the things you have succeeded 
in, the things you have failed in, the things you 
might have done once, and did not, and why you 
did not. Think in a dispassionate and cold- 
blooded way. Consider where you stand, and if 
you do that faithfully, honestly, sincerely, you 
will be in a position to move with much greater 
certainty, to be a much more steady and poised 
and efficient person, than you could while you 
were making shots in the dark, as you had to do 
when you were young. There will come into 
your life the sense of effectiveness, the sense of 
knowing what you are about and where you are 
going; and the fret and fever, the heartbreaking 
sense of failure which pursued you when you 
were making one false start after another, will 
pass away. I asked myself this morning, as 
honestly as I could, would I go back now to be 
young again if I could? If I could be twenty 
again, would I? For a moment I thought, ‘Yes, 
I would, if I could,’ and then I asked myself why, 
and do you know what the reason was? It was 
because I was imagining myself going back to 
twenty with all the knowledge of myself that I 
have at forty-seven. I figured to myself that I 
would not waste my time again trying to be 
something quite other than anything I ever could 
be. I imagined myself going back to be twenty 


MIDDLE AGE 23 


with all that I have gained in the process of years. 
I wanted to go back and avoid all the mistakes 
I have made, and all the time that I have wasted, 
with the knowledge of myself that middle age 
has given to me. Well, anyone would like to do 
that, because all of us have made mistakes we wish 
we had not made, and lost opportunities we wish we 
had not lost; and if anyone were to say, Go back 
now, and avoid all those errors, who that has any 
penitence in him at all would not say, ‘‘Thank 
God. I will go and no more make these mistakes.” 
But when I asked myself, would you go back and 
be twenty as you were at twenty? Would you do 
that? No, indeed I would not. Why should I 
go again through all those blunders and stupidities, 
through all that fret and anxiety, and lose what 
I have learned? 

To-day I have instead the knowledge which 
comes with middle age, and which gives a thrill 
to the middle-aged. I realise that at this point 
of life, standing, so to speak, on the watershed of 
life, death becomes real in a sense that it cannot 
be real to the young. The young do not really 
expect to die, no, not when the chances of death 
are all round them. When men go into battle, 
ninety-nine out of a hundred expect that they 
will come out safe. They go into it, perhaps, 
with terror in their hearts, brave as they are. 
They know that they may be struck. And yet 
there is an invincible conviction in the minds of 


24 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


most that they will not—that they are of those 
who will come out safe. But when we come to 
middle age, there comes suddenly a thrilling sense 
of the reality of death. It is not any longer a 
mere fact of common knowledge that we must 
die: it is a reality. We shall die and go on to 
some other life, and all that we do here and now 
has a significance there. What we are now, and 
what we make of the rest of our lives is part of 
our schooling for the life hereafter. Everything 
we do and say and think counts for that. Do you 
think your education at school and college for life 
in this world, with all its mystery, is half as won- 
derful as the education of life itself for death? 
How little the young know of life! How full of 
romance and mystery and wonder it is! Yes, 
but they know more about the life here than you 
and I know about life hereafter. 

This consciousness comes, I think, with a 
sudden reality, when we reach the middle of our 
life and perhaps reckon with ourselves, ‘‘I have 
lived now longer than I have yet, in the normal 
way, to live.’”’ When death becomes a reality to 
us so, it brings a sense of wonder, a background 
of infinity into this life, which makes the idea of 
middle age being dreary or dull impossible. 

I never felt life half so romantic as I did the 
first time I realised—not knew, for we all know it— 
but realised—that I should have to die, and that 
this life on earth is just a stage. 


MIDDLE AGE 25 


“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar.” 


And, coming from afar, we pause on this earth for 
awhile, and go on. That is what makes life so 
significant. What would life matter, after all, 
if this were all? The significance and the wonder 
and the romance of life is in its preparation for 
another and yet greater adventure. Sir James 
Barrie, who has said more true and wonderful 
things than any man of his generation, never said 
anything more wonderful and true than when he 
said, ‘‘To die will be an awfully great adventure.”’ 
The radiance of that adventure shines on us when 
we begin to realise the significance of our lives as 
an episode here, in some infinite hereafter. 

So it matters tremendously when you are 
middle-aged and have made many mistakes, and 
are even, perhaps, in the wrong way altogether, 
that you should set to work here and now to use 
the rest of your life, not as though life were dreary 
and dull, but as an episode in a great journey, 
whose end is God. 

Set to work and discipline yourself. One of 
the dreadful things about being middle-aged is 
that other people do not discipline us in the way 
they used to when we were young. We can 
always have the most comfortable chair in the 


26 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


room. Nobody will tell us that we are eating 
too much, or that we are eating the wrong things! 
I once knew an elderly lady who had so delicate 
a digestion that she.could not eat bread: she could 
only eat hot scones! We used to say to one 
another that she was silly and greedy, but do you 
think we ever said that to her face? If I had 
eaten hot scones at twenty and said I could not 
digest bread, I should have been told the truth 
about myself. But we can let ourselves go when 
we are middle-aged, because there are very few 
people in a position to pull us up. That is per- 
haps even more true of men than it is of women. 
They are ‘‘the head of the family,” and how many 
of your families, gentlemen, are going to discipline 
you? If the children do, you think they are 
merely impertinent. If the wife does, she has 
to do it so exquisitely carefully, that it is not 
really as good discipline as it ought to be. Re- 
member therefore that you can pull up the young 
people, or you can at least make them know that 
they are not exactly the ideal people in the home 
they might be; but how about you? How easy 
it is now to escape the discipline of life in little 
things! I do not mean the great big things that 
overwhelm us all sometimes, but those little 
things which, properly treated, make us strong 
enough to deal with the big things. 

Really, most of us eat too much. That sounds 
a mundane thing to say from a pulpit, but it is 


MIDDLE AGE 27 


not unimportant. When Dr. Julia Seaton urged 
us to fast, she said it was especially good for those 
who were middle-aged, and quoted a certain 
saying of our Lord’s:— 


“Shall the children of the bride chamber fast while 
the bridegroom is with them” or the young fast while 
life is full and vigorous and strong and splendid? 
The time will come when they will lose that. ‘‘ Then 
shall they fast in those days.”’ 


We middle-aged people have ceased to grow 
physically. We shall not grow any more. Life 
is not demanding much of us in that sense. We 
should not clog our bodies by giving them what 
they do not need. Deny yourself, discipline 
yourself. It is a very ancient rule of the great 
religions of the world, that people should fast 
sometimes. It is not for nothing that they 
develop that discipline. In middle age especially, 
we should advance to a new and heroic mastery 
over our bodies. 

Discipline yourself intellectually. It is not 
too late to learn. Learning can be made a habit, 
and the longer you keep it up, the younger you 
will be in spirit. Do not say it is too late for you 
to learn. Try to see whether you are not 
cleverer than you thought! If you will feed your 
mind (which goes on developing after the demands 
of the body have ceased) it will go on growing. 
It is at the point at which you say—or find your- 


28 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


self inclined to say—‘‘it is too late for me to learn 
this and that and the other” that you begin to 
grow old. Youth is full of curiosity and desire to 
learn, but by degrees we find that learning is 
difficult, and involves a good deal of energy and 
trouble. We begin to dread ‘‘the pain of a new 
idea’’ and the old ideas seem quite good enough. 
So at middle age we are inclined to believe that it 
is too late. It is too late at that exact moment 
when you are resigned to its being too late! For 
not to be able to change is to begin to die, and 
as long as you can change, as long as your mind 
can grow and your intellect take things in, your 
spirit is still young; and being young, it keeps all 
the rest of you young. 

Then, because you know who you are and 
what you are, what your line in life is, you need 
not be in a state of anxiety and haste. A certain 
peace of mind should come to you, a certain sense 
of balance, and serenity. Take time, even if you 
have to take it by violence. ‘‘The kingdom of 
heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take 
it by force.’”” Take time to be quiet. It is not 
displeasing, it is not offensive, for the young to 
be in a hurry. Perhaps they ought to cultivate 
quietness, but it is natural for them to be in haste. 
They have so much to do, so much to understand, 
so much to know. But there is something repel- 
lent about the middle age that has no serenity and 
no poise, that is always racketing about mentally, 


MIDDLE AGE 29 


that has no peace in its heart. After all, you 
have got away, or should have got away, from 
that fever and fret—in return for what? Not 
just vacancy, not just dulness, but peace. The 
peace which the world cannot give, but which 
you must take, have time to take, and keep your 
mind at rest. 

In that silence which is far, far more necessary 
to you than to the young, you will know yourself 
better, and you will know others also, and knowing 
them you will believe in them, for this certainly 
life has taught us, that every human being has 
capacities for goodness, and even for greatness, 
and that cynicism and disappointment and dis- 
illusion are simply the opinion of the egotist 
against all the history of humanity. The blows 
that have fallen upon you, the ideals that you 
found it so difficult to believe in, the disillusion- 
ment that sets in for you, the disappointments in 
other human beings, these things are your ex- 
perience. Look abroad, and see whether it is 
not a fact that it is goodness and love and brother- 
liness and friendship, and essential decency that 
holds the world together. What do those people 
mean who tell us that human nature is so evil? 
Are they really so ignorant as to suppose that if 
the world were more evil than good it could hold 
together at all? The evidence of their own 
experience should at least include this great fact, 
that only good things can cohere, that only good- 


30 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


ness binds and creates and holds together, and 
that therefore if the world holds together at all, 
it is because there is more good in it than bad. 
These ideals that you find it so difficult to hold— 
why do you find it difficult? Because of your 
personal disappointment? Because people have 
disappointed you? Because they have misjudged 
you and treated you unkindly and been ungrateful 
for the things you did for them? Don’t you realise 
if you look at yourself, how much it is your fault? 
Those things that hurt most savagely when we 
are young will not hurt so much when we are 
older, and not because we have grown cynical 
and think it does not matter, but because we 
have begun to understand why these things 
happen. 

Why do people seem ungrateful? I will tell 
you. Almost always it is because they have 
not understood what you have tried to do for 
them. When people do understand, their grati- 
tude is almost pathetic. Some little tiny thing 
that costs you nothing will bring you a world of 
gratitude, because the person for whom you did 
it understood the thing you did. The thing 
which does not bring you gratitude, either you 
have done badly, and therefore did not deserve 
thanks, or else the ungrateful person does not 
understand. Have you always understood? Have 
you not a thousand times received benefits and 
not had the faintest notion what they cost to 


MIDDLE AGE 31 


other people? If you are such a good, kind, 
decent person and can in your own conscience 
count a thousand times when you were ungrateful, 
and yet you know you were trying to behave 
decently, why should you be so bitter against 
others? Perhaps they are trying to behave 
decently, just as hard as you are, when they 
misjudge you. Do you never misjudge them? 
How can you possibly judge anyone without 
knowing them? And you do not know anyone 
perfectly, not anyone at all, and yet you utter a 
judgment every time you open your lips. Do you 
remember that moving passage in one of George 
Eliot’s novels, in which she says, ‘‘Perhaps at 
the very moment that you are criticising someone 
for his failure, he is suffering an agony of regret 
for the thing he did wrong.’”’ You would not 
misjudge him—you would not judge him at all, 
if you knew that. While the world judges you, 
why need you be cynical about it? After all, 
would you like people to know everything about 
you? They cannot be perfectly just unless they 
do. Do you want them to? You know you do 
not. There is not one of us that has not got some 
reserves that only God can know. Well, then, 
why should you be discouraged or cynical, or 
think evil of the world because people do not 
judge you quite wisely and are not always as 
grateful as you think they should be? 

Middle age should bring a deep kindliness of 


32 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


view, and a deeper understanding of oneself and 
a deeper understanding of other people. Listen, 
be silent, pray; because your time is shorter than 
it was twenty years ago, it is all the more necessary 
that you should direct it rightly now. Life and 
death are to you greater adventures than when 
you were young. You had more time then to 
make your mistakes. Now you have less time, 
more knowledge. Go directly on your path, and 
remember that death is not the end. It is only 
the beginning of something else. 

Does not that bring back to you the romance 
and the glory of youth? Christ, as I reminded 
you at the beginning, knew no middle age in our 
sense of the word, but his experience in that 
comparatively short life went so deep that we 
find him at the heart of all experience. He went 
through all the gamut of human experience, and 
in the end he said what we must all learn to say, 
‘Father, into thy hands I trust my spirit.’”’ All 
that you are doing, learning, being, now is an 
education for that moment, and beyond it, into 
the hands of God, trust your spirit. 


OLD AGE 


THINK it is very presumptuous of me to 

preach about growing old, because, although 
I have been young and now am in middle life, I 
do not yet know old age. But, though I am 
convinced that beautiful old age is a most in- 
spiring and lovely thing, I am certain that none 
of us will achieve a beautiful old age unless we 
begin to achieve it while we are young! So it 
seemed to me that it would be worth while to try 
to say something. 

If you young people are going to be beautiful 
old people, you must start now. For this is 
largely a matter of habit, and habits are things 
that we are forming all the time. As we grow 
older, our habits grow old with us, and become 
much more difficult to change, and if we are going 
to be at all inspiring or beautiful or “‘reverend”’ 
when we are old, we ought to begin very young. 

We are creatures of habit, and when a habit 
has grown right into us, we begin to feel that 
any kind of change must be bad. I want to ask 
all middle-aged people, and all old ones, to realise 
this: that change is a sign of life. To think that 

33 


34 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


change is bad in itself (which is a very common 
temptation as we grow older) is a denial of life. 
We must change if we are alive, and therefore, 
although there are bad changes as well as good 
changes, our attitude of mind ought to be that 
we do welcome change, and not that we dread it. 
There are bad changes, of course; but change 7m 
itself is a sign of life, and therefore we ought to be 
troubled if we are not changing; and when old 
people say that the younger generation is very 
mad and very bad, just because it is different 
from the older generation, should they not realise 
that change is part of life, and therefore the 
younger generation must be different from the 
older one? It is at least possible that the changes 
that we notice as we grow old are changes for 
the better, and not changes for the worse. When 
therefore we find ourselves inclined to say that 
it is really dreadful that the younger generation 
should do this, or that, or the other, let us ask 
ourselves before we say it—even as we feel the 
words forming on our lips—whether it really is 
dreadful, or whether it is not something which 
may possibly be better than what our own gen- 
eration did. There is no subject, for example, 
on which every generation waxes more eloquent 
than the way in which young people, young girls 
especially, dress, and people complain of this 
generation as of others; yet I am confident that 
reasonable people, if they stopped to think, would 


OLD AGE 35 


see that women’s dress has never been more 
beautiful, more dignified, or more rational than 
it is in the present generation. I am delighted 
to find that Sir George Newman tells us that the 
lower death-rate and the improved health of this 
generation is largely due to the way in which 
women dress! Let me read what he says: 


‘““More reasonable dress, the disappearance of tight 
clothing and trailing skirts, a far larger amount of 
outdoor exercise, more active amusements and 
athletics, and open-air life, have brought an immense 
improvement in the personal health of men and 
women, an improvement which has almost abolished 
a form of anemia previously common, and has 
materially affected the whole standard of their 
health.” 


Well, that is only one, and perhaps you will think 
a frivolous example, but there is no complaint 
more common than for each generation in turn 
to say that the younger generation dresses in a 
manner ugly, indecent, and intolerable, whereas 
if we stop to look we shall see that—if for safety’s 
sake, I press my case a little beyond any genera- 
tion that can possibly be present to-night !—the 
race whose women once wore crinolines and now 
dress as they do is certainly going forward. 

Take a more serious instance. The other day 
a friend of mine (who is young enough to know 
better) expressed horror at the terrible increase 


a 


36 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


of vulgar curiosity which caused a certain bunga- 
low where a terrible murder had been committed, 
to be opened as an exhibition to the public. Now 
just stop and think. It is only a very short time, 
as history goes, since, not the bungalow where the 
crime was committed, but the murderer being 
put to death was a public exhibition, which people 
went in crowds to see and also took their children 
to see. Nothing in the world prevented that from 
going on but public opinion. Undoubtedly there 
are people to-day who, if such a terrible thing 
could be seen, would go and see it. Never- 
theless, it is the opinion of the mass of the people 
that has put a stop to the exhibition of the dying 
agonies of a man executed by process of law. 
There is not an “‘increase in vulgar curiosity”’; 
there is a decrease. And if you will only consider, 
you will see again and again that those things 
which strike you with pain and horror in the present 
generation strike you with pain and horror pre- 
cisely because public opinion is now so much 
more sensitive, so much more humane, than it 
was; that a thing which would have passed with- 
out notice a little while ago, to-day seems to us 
terrible. It is an increased sensitiveness, a higher 
public opinion, that makes us sensitive to these 
things. 

Look wider. Look further. You will see that 
that increased sensitiveness is a sign of the im- 
provement of public opinion, and that indeed 


OLD AGE 37 


very often the things which we deplore as signs 
of degeneracy in the younger generation really 
show it on the upgrade and not on the down. 

May I suggest that that idea should be wel- 
come to anyone who has a decent humanity? 
If there is one thing that does seem sometimes 
rather terrible in old age, it is not so much that 
they believe we are going to the dogs, but that 
some of them seem to take a distinct pleasure in 
the belief! They delight to think how much 
better their generation was, and in a sense, al- 
though they shake their heads over it and deplore 
it, they seem positively to enjoy the spectacle of 
the world going to the dogs. 

Oh, older brothers and sisters, do you not see 
that when you bring an indictment against the 
younger generation, you are bringing a far more 
serious indictment against yourselves? For we 
were once in your hands. You are our parents. 
You were our teachers. Our heredity is handed 
on to us from you, and our environment in those 
years when we were most susceptible was in your 
hands. Educationists say that the first seven 
years of a child’s life are those in which his char- 
acter is moulded. Psychologists tell us that 
before the child is born into the world its tempera- 
ment is being affected, and its destiny perhaps 
decided. Those years of early infancy, those 
months before the child was born into the world, 
were in your hands, and although I do not for an 


38 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


instant absolve anyone from his personal respon- 
sibility, yet I must think that to bring an indict- 
ment against the younger generation is always, 
if the older one would realise it, to bring a far 
more terrible indictment against the older one. 
What have you done to us that we have not done 
better? What start did you give us that we are 
not able to make a better thing of life than this? . 
You should desire, should you not, both for our 
sakes and your own, that we go further than you 
did? It is a short-sighted egotism which makes 
an old man glad when the work to which he has 
set his hand goes to pieces when he leaves it. It 
is a poor kind of pride that delights in the thought 
that the others cannot get on without him, that 
when he leaves everything is ruined! Surely it 
is a greater tribute to you to know that the 
younger generation profits by the start you gave 
them. If they do not go further than you went, 
what was the matter with you that you gave them 
so ill a start? Let us admit that it is, at first, 
hard to see the work that you started, that you 
created, that you built up, falling into the hands 
of others who will, perhaps, do it better than you 
could. So the old sometimes hold on to power 
with a passionate, a desperate grasp. They can- 
not let it go because they cannot bear to know 
that others will take it up and use it better than 
they did. Surely that is an ignoble feeling, 
though perhaps it sometimes attacks us all. We 


OLD AGE 39 


should realise that our true greatness can be 
measured by the extent to which the others whom 
we started, perhaps our children, our employés, our 
friends, our disciples, can surpass us—the dis- 
tance by which they can go beyond. A generous 
old age takes a disinterested and beautiful pride 
in the fact that the world does go forward. Per- 
haps you have a right to think that you gave the 
world a little push forward. You helped it in 
the right direction. But then that terrible desire 
to hold on to things, which so withers and cramps 
them, came to you. How can we conquer it? 
we must not, I think, ever let ourselves take a 
short-sighted or a personal view, but must, as 
life goes on, seek for an ever wider and wider vision 
and realise that in proportion as our work was 
well done, it will grow beyond us. 

Again, we must beware of our own habits. 
The older we get, the fewer people there are to 
tell us that our habits are odious, and that we 
really must break them! Therefore we must 
tell it to ourselves. Very often the reason why 
older people are not welcomed by the younger (if 
they are not welcome) is not for any very great 
or glaring fault of character. It is simply that 
their habits have become idols, so that they want 
everything to be exactly ‘just so.’”’ Young 
people can be overridden. We can tell them not 
to make a fuss; that it does not matter a bit 
whether their egg is boiled for four minutes or 


40 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


four anda half! But as we grow older, we gradu- 
ally allow ourselves to feel that these things are 
very important and that—for us at least—they 
must be just so. When you begin to feel like 
that, pull yourself up. If you like your egg 
boiled for three and a half minutes, boil it for 
five for once, and see how you get on. You will 
find either that it really does not matter and you 
can eat your egg just as well, or that you can go 
without it, and the world does not stop. Let us 
acquire the habit of realising that no habit matters 
very much! Let us train ourselves to hold things 
lightly and not to hang on to individual habits 
though they have become like a sort of shell in 
which we live. This it is to be young in spirit; 
and to feel that every little thing—how we live, 
and how we work, and how we sleep, and what 
we eat, and so on—matters tremendously, this it 
is to grow old. We should have grown, as we 
grow older, beyond that. It is natural for young 
people to think that small things matter very 
much, because they have not yet learnt to see 
beyond them. Each little thing in turn is so 
important. A child cannot see beyond the disap- 
pointment of a wet day when it was going for a 
picnic, because it has not learnt yet to see further 
than that one day. There are people, like child- 
ren, whose whole day is blighted if they have to 
go and see the dentist. A little experience of 
life should help us to realise that the moment will 


OLD AGE 41 


infallibly arrive when we shall leave the dentist’s 
chair, and regain that rapturous feeling with 
which we go out. 

For old people not to have got beyond a momen- 
tary discomfort or a disturbance of personal 
habits is melancholy, is it not? And it is, believe 
me, very often the reason why young people find 
the company of old people burdensome. It is 
not age that makes it so. It is not age: it is in- 
sistence on all manner of little things that do not 
really matter. The habit of looking beyond 
the troubles and inconveniences of the day can 
be cultivated. 

Some people have written to me on this subject 
of old age, that what chiefly distresses them is 
the feeling of depression and discouragement 
that comes, and that is perhaps inevitable, because 
physically their powers are running down. Be- 
lieve me, the young often feel depressed. ‘This is 
not a matter of age. There is no despair so great 
as the despair of youth. It is a darkness that 
overwhelms the young because they cannot yet 
see beyond their own failures and their own mis- 
takes. Speaking from my own experience among 
old and young, I would say that the sense of utter 
discouragement, the feeling that you cannot 
make any impression on the world, cannot get 
the work you want or, when you have it, are sure 
to make a failure of it, is far more black and far 
more overwhelming with the young than it is 


42 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


with the old. We are all depressed sometimes, 
and there is a certain gallantry in putting that 
depression away where people cannot see it. But 
that ts a discipline that life ought. to make easier 
to us, and not harder. 

Above all, do not be afraid. Depression that 
comes from fear is very hard to bear. Perhaps 
those who worked hardest when they were young, 
and cared most, and achieved most, are most open 
in middle and old age to that kind of fear which 
comes with the sense that the things you fought 
for and won, perhaps with blood and sweat, are 
vanishing or losing their value. The beliefs 
which you had such a hard intellectual battle to 
achieve—are they now vanishing in a newer light? 
Perhaps a delusive light? You won, shall I say, 
your Christian faith, those of you who are Chris- 
tians. You won it in the teeth of such difficul- 
ties! You had such a hard fight! And now the 
younger generation comes along, and all the 
things for which you fought so hard seem to them 
of no importance. Something came along—as, 
in an older generation, science came along—to 
revolutionise our ideas about the world, and you 
fought your way through that. You reached, 
you thought, a steady place to stand on, and now 
the world goes on, and the world’s thought, and 
that steady place seems to shake under you. 
You had a hard fight, perhaps, about your attitude 
towards the Bible. You won through to some- 


OLD AGE 43 


thing, some place—I do not know what it is for 
each of you. Then there arises some newer 
school of thought and the very field of battle is 
changed, and the old cries are silent, and the 
things that cost you so much are nothing to the 
younger generation. The battle has swept on, 
and you who were in the van are now lingering in 
the rear, and you ask yourself what use was all 
the struggle and the cost. Is nothing stable? 
Is nothing sure? 

‘“‘We watch,’ Mrs. Creighton writes, ‘‘some- 
times with almost trembling dread, the passing 
away of the old ideas that we have trusted, the 
coming of strange ways of thought, the sweeping 
away of familiar landmarks, the crude ugliness 
ofttimes of change to-day.’”’ How true that is! 
To-day, perhaps, many are feeling about psycho- 
logy just what a previous generation felt about 
what is called ‘‘natural science.’ It seems to be 
digging away at the very roots of their religion— 
that religion for which they had to fight so hard— 
and the very change of the battle-ground is a 
hardship for those who fought on the old fields. 
The very heroism with which they fought made 
the victory precious to them, and to find now 
that a new battle is raging in some other place, 
while the things which were to you the very rock 
on which you stood seem to be disappearing in a 
kind of mist, makes you afraid. 

Well, but it need not! You fought through to 


44. LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


that point. Do you want the world to stop 
there? You who were a fighter, do you want 
the younger generation to have no fight? In 
your heart you must desire this thing that on the 
surface of your mind you are afraid of The 
first fear that perhaps you are too old to change, 
too tired to dream of fresh ideals in a world so 
changed, strikes chill. But it would be more 
terrible still if there were no change. From the 
point that you won the next generation starts, 
and if you fought the battle there and found God 
with you all the time, need you be afraid because 
these younger ones will fight the battle further on 
and find God with them all the time? 

Look for a moment at the tragic harm, the 
terrible disaster, it has been to religion that, in 
the generation to which natural science came as 
a great revelation, theologians fought against it, 
and religious people were frightened of it. We 
can all see now what a disaster it was. We are, 
theologically, two generations behind scientific 
thought, because of that fear. 

Well, now, if the younger generation advances 
to meet a fresh battle, and to engage in a fresh 
struggle for its ideals and its faith, we shall wish 
them God-speed. Would it not be a disaster if 
there were no fresh issue before humanity, no 
great field for achievement? You need not be 
anxious. You have lived a long life, and all 
through it you have seen that God was greater 


OLD AGE 45 


than any human thought and transcendent above 
all human fear. Why should you be afraid? 
Follow the battle in your thoughts. Take your 
courage, you who have proved your courage, and 
know it, and can rely on it, take it with you and 
see whether you also cannot even now play some 
part in the great battle. Mrs. Creighton in this 
same little pamphlet on old age, speaks of a very 
distinguished theologian, Dr. Salmon, who in the 
very last years of his life—and he lived to a very 
great age—was working at an important book on 
the Synoptic Gospels. If we are always learning 
and never allow our minds to harden, that may 
be possible to us also. And if a man, whose 
whole life has been given to theological discussion, 
should in old age have the courage to advance at 
the end to a fresh discussion and a fresh battle, 
is it not magnificent? 

There is an old age that inspires and delights. 
It will go on, this world of ours, for the Holy 
Spirit is leading it on, and that you should have 
been a fighter should make you sympathise with — 
those who are fighting now. Learn to hold loosely 
all that is not eternal. Perhaps these victories 
over our intellectual habits and over our physical 
habits is God’s gentle way of training us for im- 
mortality. He is teaching us to hold lightly the 
things that belong to the body, yes, and even to 
the mind, because the time comes when we shall 
““pass through”’ these ‘‘things temporal to things 


46 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


eternal.’’ Our fear of that is largely a fear of the 
unknown, is it not? It is because we do not 
know—we cannot imagine—how it will be to be 
without this flesh-and-blood body which has 
accompanied us through all our life on earth. 
But if your mind is being trained by God as the 
years pass, to hold things lightly, to fix itself on 
things eternal, and to realise that the temporal 
things are very passing, will not death itself be 
less terrible as the idea of the eternal becomes 
more familiar to the spirit? Old age itself is like 
a summer holiday before the ‘‘higher education”’ 
to which we are going on, and should seem in all 
its beauty like that holiday. 

Let us begin now to make a habit of remember- 
ing that this life is only an episode in our im- 
mortality, and old age the holiday which we take 
when we are tired. When the loveliest holiday 
of the year, the summer holiday, comes round, 
you do not feel, as you go off to it, ‘‘Now I am 
letting go of everything. This is the end.’’ You 
enjoy your holiday, you delight in it, partly 
because you are tired and want a rest, but more 
because you know that when you are rested you 
can return to work and do it better. Soisit with 
old age: you are going on to something else. You 
have some higher adventure, some greater life, 
some nobler education waiting for you on the 
other side. Is it not natural then to rest first, 
and, as Browning says, sum up your gains—yes, 


OLD AGE 47 


and your losses too—and look at them calmly 
and serenely, 


‘‘Fearless and unperplexed, 
When you wage battle next, 
What weapons to select, what armour to indue.” 


It is possible to think of old age as that time of 
rest and meditation and silence, and even of 
aloneness; I will not say loneliness, for such an 
old age is not lonely, although it may be alone. 
Many of those who were your friends, who, 
thank God, still are your friends, have passed 
over before you. The longer you live the fewer 
you will have on this side, and the more on the 
other. That also is lovely; but perhaps, here 
and now, you feel it leaves you alone. Why, no, 
it leaves you time to be more with God, and there 
again we must begin young, for unless we grow 
into the habit of being silent sometimes with 
God and going away, perhaps, from all our friends 
and acquaintances to be alone with God, we do 
not easily acquire that habit in old age. If we 
begin while we are young, or middle-aged, the 
desire to be alone with God will grow upon us, 
and old age, though in a sense it must be isolated, 
can never then be lonely. 

Do not then desire to ‘‘die in harness.’”” How 
often I have heard people say that: ‘‘ How splendid 
to die in harness! To be cut off in the midst of 
one’s work!’’ Do not desire it. It is a poor, 


48 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


cowardly desire. Desire to see the whole of life, 
to have time to consider, to wait, to judge. To 
miss old age is to miss something natural, beautiful 
and right. Are you so poor in thought, are you 
so unaccustomed to silence and to God that you 
must die in the height of your work, in all the 
racket of public business, in all the crowd and 
press of middle age? Do you not ever feel, you 
middle-aged ones, that you would like leisure, 
and loneliness even, for awhile? Do you not 
feel it? Do you want to die with your mind in 
such a racket that you have had no time to think? 
Well, perhaps our minds should never be so; and 
yet it is difficult for them not to be so when the 
world presses on one at every turn, and consid- 
erations of family, of friends, of work, and so 
onaresoclamorous. Butif you have the capacity 
for friendship with God, surely you must some- 
times look forward to that time of peace when 
the world will not claim so much of your time and 
thought and energy, when you will have time to 
think, and to be silent, and to listen to the voice 
of God. 

If that old age is possible to you, it is an old 
age which will be an inspiration and a glory to 
your children and your younger friends. The 
young are generous. They are prone to hero- 
worship. They easily make idols of those who 
are noble and good, and though it would not be 
natural or right for the young always to desire 


OLD AGE 49 


the society of the old, there are old people whom 
they instinctively desire sometimes to be with. 
Surely we have all known some such—some old 
man or woman—whose spirit was so youthful, 
and whose charm so great, through their wisdom, 
their gentleness, their tolerance, their interest 
in the world’s progress, that it was a delight to 
be with them. Perhaps the real bitterness of old 
age is the fear of being useless, the feeling that 
you are no longer any use in the world: but can 
these feel they are no use? There is no inspira- 
tion so glorious as a beautiful old age. That you 
should be able to keep your ideals through all 
the fever and fret of life, and still hold them, and 
believe in them, and send us out with them on a 
great quest, that is glorious! Our ideals, the 
ideals of the middle-aged and the ideals of 
the young, are cheap compared with yours. The 
young have not yet fought for them. They have 
not bled for them. They do not know yet 
whether they really believeinthem. They cannot 
know—none of us can know till we have put it to 
the proof, how much of our idealism is true, how 
much based on the rock. But if you can still 
be sure of God, if you can still believe in man, if 
your ideals are still rooted firm through all the 
tempest, what an inspiration are you to the 
younger generation! You give us faith; you 
give us confidence; you give us courage, because 
we see in you a faith that has borne the heat and 


50 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


stress of the day, and at the end is stronger than 
at the beginning. You have fought the good 
fight. You have carried through and carried on 
until the end. And in the world there is no 
greater service than this. You pass now from 
things temporal to things eternal, and your 
passing becomes the oriflamme to those who 
follow. 

There. is a passage at the end of Bunyan’s 
‘‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’’ where he describes the 
land of Beulah, which is old age, where the pil- 
grims rest awhile before they cross the river of 
death. 


“This river,’”’ he says, “‘has been a terror to many; 
yea, the thoughts of it, also, have often frightened 
me: but now, methinks, I stand easy; my foot is fixed 
upon that on which the feet of the priests that bare 
the ark of the covenant stood while Israel went over 
this Jordan. The waters, indeed, are to the palate 
bitter, and to the stomach cold, yet the thoughts of 
what I am going to, and of the convoy that wait for 
me on the other side, lie as a glowing coal at my heart.” 


Then there comes that wonderful description of 
the soul crossing the river of death. 


“Then,” said he, “I am going to my Father’s; 
and though with great difficulty I have got hither, 
yet now I do not repent me of all the troubles I have 
been at to arrive where I am. . . .’’ When the 
day that he must go hence was come, many accom- 


OLD AGE 5I 


panied him to the riverside, into which as he went he 
said, ‘‘Death, where is thy sting?’”’ And as he went 
down deeper, he said, ‘‘Grave, where is thy victory?” 
So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for 
him on the other side. 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 


FEW years ago a great London doctor was 
walking through one of the mean streets of 
a poor part of London, when he noticed in a 
window an announcement of an exhibition where 
there was to be seen for the price of a shilling an 
extraordinarily deformed and terrible human 
being. He was called ‘‘the Elephant Man,” and 
Sir Frederick Treves, having a moment’s leisure, 
paid his shilling and went in. 

He has told us the story of what he saw and 
what followed in a book which I for one have not 
got the courage to read. One’s mind sickens at 
the thought of what life must have meant to that 
man. But I read, as perhaps many of you did, 
a review of the book, and the reviewer briefly 
tells the story. He tells how Sir Frederick Treves 
went into the shop and was conducted to a room 
with a curtain hanging across it. The curtain 
was drawn by the exploiter of this unhappy 
human curiosity, and Sir Frederick Treves saw 
behind it a shapeless form, crouching under a 
kind of loose cover. His exploiter ordered him 
to get up and show himself, and he stood up and 

52 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 53 


dropped his covering. Sir Frederick Treves then 
saw a man so hideously deformed that the review- 
er, having embarked on a descriptive quotation, 
suddenly breaks off and says, ‘‘Let us leave it at 
that.” 

Sir Frederick Treves did not know what to 
do or how to help, but on the impulse of the 
moment, gave his card to the Elephant Man and 
left him, telling him if he ever wanted him, to 
send for him. Then he went away, and, I sup- 
pose, for a while forgot about it. 

It appears, however, that shortly afterwards, 
the police put a stop to the exhibition, and the 
exhibitionist took his unhappy prey to Belgium 
and exhibited him again there; but almost at 
once the police again stepped in, and he was 
forbidden to continue the exhibition. Coming to 
the conclusion that no money was to be made any 
more out of the Elephant Man, he seems to have 
put him on board ship for England with a ticket 
for London. As the reviewer says, one hesitates 
to imagine what that journey could have been 
like, but the man somehow got to London. 
There his courage failed him altogether and he 
tried to hide himself in the station. He was 
found by some of the officials, and they discovered 
Sir Frederick Treves’ card still on him and rang 
him up to ask if he knew anything about the man. 

Sir Frederick came down to the station and 
took that man home to his house, and there he 


54 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


lived for the few years that he had left—I think, 
if I remember rightly, that he died at the age of 
26. During the last two or three years of his 
life, while he was living in Sir Frederick Treves’ 
house, he had a room to himself; he was never 
seen by any human being unless he actually 
desired it; and he had an hour or so in the evening 
when he could go into the garden under Sir 
Frederick’s absolute promise that no one else 
would be there. Queen Alexandra (who surely 
will have an extra star in her crown some day 
for this!) once—no, not once, but several times— 
went and sat with him and took his hand. She 
gave the man her photograph; he put it on the 
mantelpiece and, as Sir Frederick tells us, he 
practically worshipped it. And during those 
last two or three years he said more than once 
that he was ‘“‘happy every hour of the day.” 
Happy! 

He was a man, Sir Frederick tells us, of a 
sensitive nature, of intelligence above the average. 
You would not have wondered, would you— 
indeed, you would almost have expected—that 
a man’s spirit, enclosed in such a prison, would 
become as deformed as his body; would be 
poisoned with hatred against a world which had 
been to him hell. But it was not so. He was 
happy every hour of the day. And he had nothing, 
absolutely nothing, of the things that make us 
happy. No work, no gift with which he could 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 55 


serve the world, no sense that he was of value to 
anyone, no wife, no child, no equality in friend- 
ship, no sense that he could give anything to 
anybody; just an absence of torture. And he 
was happy—‘‘happy every hour of the day.”’ Is 
there not something sublime in the human spirit 
that could remain serene and gentle under so 
terrible a fate? Go through such a hell of torment 
unembittered? Be willing to be happy when 
active torment ceased, and bear—it seems—no 
angry resentment, no venomous or sullen hate 
for what was past? I wish he could know— 
perhaps he does know—that to those who have 
not even perhaps read the book but have just 
heard of him, there is a fragrance in the memory 
of that touching capacity and willingness to be 
happy, which might almost make him think his 
life had been worth living. 

And some of us are sorry for ourselves! 

Well, you may say, his suffering does not make 
it any easier for us to suffer! His was a fate, 
indeed, beyond imagination for terror and pity, 
but after all that does not make it any easier for 
us! Perhaps, in a way, the very sensitiveness 
that makes us feel for such agony only makes the 
world seem a more terrible place. That he suf- 
fered more than we do ought not to make it easier 
to suffer: it only makes it the more terrible to 
live in a world that contains such agony. If we 
are disappointed, or ill, or out of work, or unsuc- 


56 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


cessful, or unloved, the fact that this man had 
worse things to bear does not really make our 
load any lighter. 

No, it does not. I do not want to pretend 
that it does. I know that, on the contrary, toa 
sensitive soul, it often makes the world seem 
more horrible still that such a depth of suffering 
should be endured in it. But the point I want 
to make is this. This man had nothing; so far 
as we can see, absolutely nothing. Only the 
memory of unspeakable torture. Yet he was 
happy. If, therefore, he could be happy in such 
a case, to be sorry for ourselves is not inevitable. 
It is not due to outward circumstance. It is a 
vice of the mind. It is an ignoble temper. It 
is a mean cowardice in the face of pain. It 
cannot be our circumstances that make us sorry 
for ourselves, if it is possible for such a being as 
this man ever to be happy. 

If you think of the people who are sorry for 
themselves—perhaps if you are honest you will 
see that that class occasionally includes you!— 
if you think of the people who are sorry for them- 
selves, are they not just as often people who have 
much to make them happy, as people who have, 
as this man, everything to make them sad? 

I do not know a person who is more sorry for 
himself when he is a little bit ill than a person 
who has always been well. Let a person have 
practically perfect health, and the resentment 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 57 


that he feels when he has a cold or a fit of indiges- 
tion, would cause you to think that all his life 
had been one long agony of disease. But that, 
too, is not invariable. You will sometimes come 
across the person who is very strong and well as a 
rule, and who will cheerfully say, when he is ill, 
“Well, after all I have had an extraordinarily 
good time hitherto. I have been most fortunate. 
I have no cause to complain.” 

‘“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
but in ourselves,”’ that we are thus or thus. 

You know people who have some slight disap- 
pointment, some little failure, some crumpled 
rose-leaf. What an uproar they make about it! 
It blots out the sun for them; it blackens the sky. 
They have been so accustomed to prosperity 
that they do not know how to tolerate the injury 
and the injustice of having occasionally to suffer 
like other people. On the other hand, you know 
people who have indeed been buffeted by the 
world, who are most buffeted and most gay in 
spirit. . 

Some of you here will still remember Miss 
Lisette Caldecott, a member of this congregation 
since we began at Kensington Town Hall. She 
died a little while ago. She was very badly off; 
she lived alone; she was terribly lame; she suf- 
fered from an affection of the bones which crippled 
her hands and every movement, as well as her 
legs and feet. Her chief joy in life was to play the 


58 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


piano, and her hands became gradually so crippled 
that she could not play. Her other joy was to 
sketch, and she gradually became so blind that 
that went also. She was deaf. I hardly know, 
in my experience, of a more tormented human 
body; and I never found her sorry for herself. 
She looked forward to such trifling little pleasures 
with a spirit and gaiety which were full of charm. 
One by one, all the things that she cared for were 
taken from her, but her spirit was as dauntlessly 
gay as when she had them all. That a member 
or two of our congregation—some of the younger 
ones in the Auxiliary Choir—used to take her to 
her omnibus, and meet her when she came here, 
was to her the most heavenly piece of kindliness. 
She had everything to complain of, and she never 
complained. She never gave you the impression 
that she was with a heroic courage suppressing 
her complaints. Not a bit! She gave you the 
impression that she really enjoyed her life. She 
did enjoy it. 

Of course, you know people who suffer as she 
did and who are exceedingly sorry for themselves. 
Some of those who are sorry for themselves have, 
in a sense, every right to be so. But the thing 
that has struck me, who hears, perhaps, rather a 
lot about people’s griefs, is that this habit of being 
sorry for oneself does not seem to have any con- 
nection whatever with circumstances. You will 
find it in people who have every reason to com- 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 59 


plain: you will find it in people who have none: 
and because it is so independent of actual cir- 
cumstances, I am forced to the conclusion that 
it is not due to circumstances: it is a vice in the 
mind itself. 

Indeed, it zs a vice, and rather a bad one. It 
means that you are focussing your thoughts upon 
yourself. If you were to turn your mind out- 
ward you would see people who are gay and gallant 
in the face of misfortunes which, set down in cold 
blood, make an apparently overwhelming list; 
people with such a dauntless spirit that to the 
end they will be gay; people who have neither 
health nor influence nor money. ‘There is some- 
thing they will always have, these gallant spirits 
who have apparently nothing—no success, no 
particular talent, no wealth, no health—and yet 
who will extort from life its joy, and make of 
life so gallant a thing that they always have 
friends. For to such a spirit friendship is drawn, 
while we, when we are sorry for ourselves, repel 
it. The world may have a rough and ready 
judgment, but it is not fond of the coward and the 
skulker. It is not fond of people who have a 
perpetual sense of their own grievances. And 
it is right. Fundamentally it is right, for this 
-vice of self-pity is most demoralising, most 
disintegrating. Do not indulge, even for a little 
while, in the pleasant pastime of considering 
your own grievances and reflecting how odious 


60 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


everybody is to you, for to do so is to waste your 
strength. 

You wake up in the morning, and you think, 
perhaps, ‘‘I won’t get up for five minutes.”” You 
spend that time in considering what an odious 
day you are going to have. You will find that 
half an hour has gone like a flash in the considera- 
tion of that exquisite subject, yourself and your 
grievances! Half an hour is gone in a flash, and 
it does not leave you merely half an hour late: it 
leaves you demoralised and disintegrated. The 
psychologist who warns you against daydreams 
was never more right than when your dreams 
are of your own grievances. Such dreams result 
in moral disintegration; they take away your 
courage; they take away hope and leave you 
demoralised, anxious, cowardly. The world is 
too strong for you. Is it? Yet it was not too 
strong for that deformed, tormented man. The 
world is cruel to you. Is it a hundredth part as 
cruel as it was to him? Yet how swiftly his spirit 
reacted to the first touch of kindness! With how 
little resentment he brooded on the past! He 
put it away from him. It was the present in 
which he lived, because the present was kind to 
him; as I have known the same kind of spirit live 
in the future, because the future may be kind. 

It is true that that attitude of resentment 
against the world repels the world. There is 
nothing the world loves better—and here again 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 61 


it is right—than a gallant spirit, and after all, 
how can we know what lies behind the face of 
someone who takes life so gaily? How do you 
know? Behind any face that you see there may 
lie—so often there does lie—something terribly 
difficult, not necessarily tragic, though often it 
is tragic, too. But again and again when I have 
learnt to know someone whose outside life seemed 
quite smooth, quite prosperous, perhaps even 
specially so, I have marvelled at the precipice 
edge of difficulty upon which they are, in fact, 
walking—the nervous strain, the difficulty, the 
anxiety, perhaps the ill-health, the unknown 
suffering. You cannot tell of any of those who 
seetn gallant and gay, how difficult their life is, 
how easily they might pity themselves, if they 
chose. I am not speaking of any one of you. I 
am speaking of your neighbour! It is not behind 
you that this tragedy lies, but perhaps behind the 
person who is sitting next to you! I am not 
speaking of myself, for a million times when I 
have fallen into this bog of being sorry for myself 
I have found the very next person I meet is some- 
one before whose difficulties I shrink appalled, 
and am amazed at the courage and gaiety with 
which they face them. It is not that they are 
not sensitive. It is not that they do not suffer. 
As Sir Frederick Treves'said of this ‘‘Elephant 
Man,” he had a spirit sensitive beyond the aver- 
age. But with that sensitiveness there is a 


62 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


refusal to look inward and to brood over one’s 
wrongs. 

Who cannot find grievances if they like? It 
is inthe spirit that the difference lies. There are 
no circumstances of any person in this hall which 
are so ghastly as those of the man with whom I 
began, and yet he was happy. It is therefore 
possible to be happy, however cruel the world 
has been to you. It is possible to turn your gaze 
outward and, at the first touch of self-pity, to 
turn and see how others need that pity which 
you are wasting upon yourself. 

I could not ask Dr. Dearmer to-night to read 
the whole story of the Crucifixion from all the 
four gospels, and yet I wished I could; the story 
of the Crucifixion, not on Good Friday only, but 
from Thursday night, when our Lord was first of 
all betrayed with a kiss by a man whom he must 
have loved, since for three years, perhaps, he had 
been, or seemed to be, his friend. Then came the 
sight of all his friends leaving him in flight; then 
he was seized by the Roman soldiers, dragged 
from one court to another—from Caiaphas to 
Annas, to Herod, to Pontius Pilate; all through 
that night buffeted, beaten, insulted, spat upon; 
betrayed by his dearest friends, by the crowd— 
the crowd he had benefited and served; and then 
at last, in extreme physical exhaustion, carrying 
his cross, surrounded by those cruel, hating faces 
to the end. - 


ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF 63 


At last his eye falls upon some who wept for 
him. Who could have claimed their tears more 
than this Jesus? ‘‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep 
not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your 
children.” Then a little later, they nail him to 
the Cross, and he says, ‘‘Father, forgive them. 
They know not what they do.” Then the thief 
appeals to him and he says, ‘‘To-day thou shalt 
be with me in Paradise.”” ‘Then his eye falls upon 
his mother and his friends, and he thinks of them 
also. The daughters of Jerusalem—that fickle 
city; the executioners who torture him; the thief 
upon the Cross who began by deriding him; his 
mother and his friends—all of them had his sym- 
pathy, his understanding, his pity. Not to one 
does he refuse to respond. To each of them he 
says the one understanding thing which shows 
that the last person he was thinking about was 
himself. And he had all the sorrows of the world 
upon him. 

Not until the last provision is made for those 
who loved him does our Lord speak or think of 
himself. ‘“‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for 
me.” In all the agony of suffering and grief, of 
physical exhaustion and apparent failure,’ it is 
still possible so deeply and truly to love others 
that you can find no time to pity yourself. 


ON BEING A FAILURE 


O-NIGHT I am preaching about real failure: 
not about those whose lives, whatever the 
world may think of them, are not failures at all, 
but successes. Those people do not need my 
advice: they are with God. But the rest of us, 
who either have not excelled as we should like to 
excel in our work; or who have failed the people 
that we live with; who realise that we are not 
what we might have been; that we really might 
have done and might have been a great deal 
better than we are—who are, in fact, failures in 
the truest sense—want help much more than 
they. We know what the world, perhaps, does 
not know—what a failure we really are. We 
know how much better we might have done—a 
thousand times—than we have. The world sees 
what we achieve, perhaps, and admires and praises, 
and the world very likely is right. But we see 
what we do not achieve; we see all the times that 
we let opportunities pass; we know we might 
have done and been a great deal better than we 
have. 
Sometimes we all see ourselves clearly. The 
64 


ON BEING A FAILURE 65 


fact that some of us have excelled in the world’s 
eyes does not matter. What does matter is our 
own devastating sense of failure. Think of the 
people we live with, whom we might have made, 
perhaps not perfectly happy, but a great deal 
happier, than we have! Perhaps they are dis- 
agreeable people; perhaps they do not really 
appreciate us or know how charming we are 
really! All the same, we might have been a little 
pleasanter to live with than we have been. Per- 
haps they are very trying people indeed. Some 
of you, I know, do live with trying people. Yet 
when you see yourself quite clearly, though it is 
not all your fault, you feel you might have tried 
a little harder. You might have put just one 
more ounce into it. Or your work—the work, 
that perhaps you did not choose and do not like, 
yet for some reason you cannot get away from— 
you shuffle through it anyhow. It is not fair, 
you feel, that you should be put to work you 
cannot do well. But all the same, if you cannot 
get away from it, cannot get away from the un- 
congenial people you live with, cannot get away 
from some tie, or bond, or duty that is making 
life very drab and difficult and hard for you—if 
you cannot, you might put a little more into the 
business of making the best of it, might you not? 

Get out of it, if it is really the wrong work for 
you—if you can. If you are really living with 
the wrong people, get out of it—if you can. But 


66 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


there are some claims you cannot get out of, 
without walking over somebody else’s body. 
And so you do not. You are bound; and you 
feel all the time a deep resentment against life, 
a feeling that people are not fair to you, and that 
the world has not been fair to you. But when 
you see yourself quite clearly, you know you could 
have done a little better than you have and 
there comes over you a desolating sense of 
failure. 

Take hold of your life again. Take hold of it 
now, to-night, that hateful job, or those difficult 
surroundings, or those odious people. Take hold 
of life again, and see how far the fault is in you. 
If even once you suddenly see that it has been a 
little your fault, begin by accepting the fact. 
Accept the fact that you have failed. After all, 
99 per cent. of us have. Whatever we may look 
like to the world, whether we look hopelessly 
inefficient, or brilliantly successful, 99 per cent. 
of us know that according to our own measure 
of ourselves we have failed. Let us forget for a 
moment all the faults that belong to the other 
people. Do not let us pretend any more that it 
is entirely their fault. Let us think of the little 
bit—perhaps a very little bit in the case of some, 
but that bit that zs your fault, accept. Do not 
let us pretend it is just a “high failure’ and 
better than ‘“‘low success.’””’ We are not to 
choose between high failure and low success; we 


ON BEING A FAILURE 67 


are to choose between low failure and high success. 
The theory that, after all, we have tried very 
hard, and perhaps in the sight of God are more 
successful than we seem to ourselves, is often a 
demoralising one. If you have got it into your 
head that you are a failure because you are too 
good for this world, get it out again. You would 
not believe how often people tell me that they 
are too good for their lives! They fail, they 
think, ‘‘because they are too kind,’’ when it is 
really only because they are too anxious to have 
people fond of them. They believe they are 
too large-minded to notice the small troubles of 
which other people make so much, when really 
they are only too thick-skinned to notice them. 
They are so high-minded that they walk over the 
bodies of other people, and never even see what 
they are doing. If God were so high-minded 
that he could not trouble himself about your two- 
penny-halfpenny troubles and mine he would 
walk right over us, would he not? 

Sometimes we think we are too sensitive. We 
cannot help losing our tempers and being irritable, 
because we are so sensitive, much, much more 
sensitive than the coarse-natured people we have 
to live with. It is not that we are too sensitive 
really; it is that we are not strong enough. It is 
not that we are too good for this world; it is that 
we have not got ordinary common sense. Over 
and over again one thinks—I have a hundred 


68 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


times—that it is because one is really too good, 
too courageous, or too honest, that one finds the 
world against him. It is a dangerous excuse. 
It is more likely that we have not taken trouble 
enough; that we have not been brave enough; or 
that we have not taken the trouble to imagine 
what other people are feeling. Even if the things 
that worry them and do not happen to worry us 
are very little things, we may be sure that the 
things that do worry us are small enough, too. 
We might be patient, even when little trifling 
difficulties arise. Ours must look small enough 
to God. 

Abandon the idea that we have failed through 
too much goodness: but accept the fact that we 
have failed. Accept it. Take your life as it is. 
Accept it as it is, and cease from thinking how 
splendid you would be if only things were different. 
Take a good look and start again. ‘‘Oh, but,” 
you say, ‘‘some of us can’t. We have lost oppor- 
tunities that will never come back to us.’”’ True: 
but we have our new ones coming, coming to- 
night, coming to-morrow. Perhaps they are 
not so attractive as the old ones you lost, but 
they are still opportunities, and are coming all 
the time, and pass you in a stream. Forget the 
ones that are behind. Forget the ones that you 
have lost, and do not turn round to look after 
and bewail them. You have lost them. Very 
well; they are lost. Put them out of your mind. 


: 


ON BEING A FAILURE 69 


For while you are bewailing those you have lost, 
others are passing you. 

Perhaps you have hurt someone irrevocably. 
Perhaps your failure has involved other people. 
Perhaps you have hurt them morally. Now 
they have passed out of your reach, and you 
cannot get them back to help them. ‘They have 
gone, and they are damaged. It was you who 
damaged them, and you cannot undo it. Very 
well. But there are people round you now. 
Need you damage them, too? Those people 
whom we have hurt, whose self-respect, perhaps, 
we have destroyed, whose courage we have taken 
away, whose faith in human nature we have 
shaken, perhaps God, in his infinite mercy, will 
give them back to us some day to help; but if not, 
still all round us there are human beings with 
very little self-respect, very little courage, very 
little joy in the world. While you are bewailing 
the ones whom you have damaged, you are casting 
a cloud over the ones who are coming to you. 
There are people coming to you to-night, to- 
morrow, all the time. While they are there, 
all around you, forget the ones that you have 
damaged. Or if that is impossible, at least take 
joy in the fact that all the time a crowd of human 
beings is round you and passing you. The evil 
that you did you cannot undo, indeed, but you 
can redeem it by never damaging other people. 
Help them while you can, and be joyful in their 


70 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


joy, and sympathise with their sorrow, and do 
not hurt, or damage, or destroy. 

Perhaps it is yourself that is damaged. We- 
cannot be failures all the time, or even a great 
deal of the time, without our failure having an 
effect on our character. The horrible part of it 
is that if we lose opportunities, we ourselves are 
damaged. We are not the fine people we might 
have been. If we had always put that last ounce 
into our effort we should have grown into some- 
thing fine; and we have not. We have shrunk 
into something much less fine than we might 
have been. We have not got the power; we 
have not got the insight; we have not got the 
knowledge and the wisdom that a finer experience 
would have brought us. If we have slipped along 
from one failure to another, or from one poor, 
miserable little success to another, we have at 
last no power to do the great things that we might 
have done if we had always done our best. 

Well, but you are still there! You are still 
alive! You are not dead! Begin again, from 
where you are now. Forget to wring your hands 
for what you might have been. I dare to say 
forget it, perhaps, because I know in my heart 
that you cannot forget it. But at least do not 
spend your time cursing yourself because you 
are not the great person that God knows you 
might have been if you had always put your 
mind to his service. The fact that you are still 


ON BEING A FAILURE 71 


alive gives you opportunities. The fact that you 
are still there is your chance. If you have defin- 
itely descended from a high plane on which you 
once lived and moved, if you can see that you 
are not—I will not say what you hoped to be— 
but even what you once actually were, start on 
that lower plane. You are there. Start there. 
Do not waste your time going any lower. Start 
where you are, and do not think it is noble or 
praiseworthy to be wringing your hands and curs- 
ing yourself for what cannot now be helped. 
Wherever you are, whether you drink, or take 
drugs, or steal, or whether you are only guilty of 
ordinary ‘‘respectable sins,’’ like deceit, and 
insincerity, and selfishness, and jealousy—where- 
ever you are, start there. You are still alive. - 
Begin again, however difficult it is. 

You have lost your time at school, and you 
will never now have a decent education. You 
have lost your time at college, perhaps; you did 
not realise how precious it was, and it is gone. 
You have not read the books you should have 
read or prepared yourself for your work as you 
should have done, and though perhaps you 
scraped through your examinations, that does 
not amount to very much. Or you are getting 
older, and the generous enthusiasm of youth has 
left you. Perhaps you are getting middle-aged, 
and it seems asifit really istoolatenow. Perhaps 
you are more than elderly—you are getting old. 


72 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


There are only a few years left to you. It does 
not matter. You are an immortal spirit, and 
before you stretches eternity. There is no point 
in your life at which you shall say, ‘“There I give 
it up: I cannot now do anything.”’ If you are 
sixteen, or sixty, or a hundred and sixty, it does 
* not matter. You are an immortal spirit. Do not 
give yourself up, but start again. All eternity 
before you, and you only on the threshold of it, 
whatever your years are in this world! 

You will have to go back some day and undo all 
the harm you do. You will have to retrace your 
steps some day and do again what you have done 
wrong. You must at last retrace with bleeding 
feet the path on which you now go from failure 
‘to failure. ‘‘As a man soweth, so shall he also 
reap.”’ 

But if you take your immortality as a divine 
inheritance, if to you it is a great thing, and a 
glory, it is because you are now beginning to 
retrace your steps, and it is glorious to think that 
you have eternity in which to grow Godlike. Do 
not make of that eternal inheritance a curse, by 
going further and further down, for the time must 
come when you will retrace your steps and go up 
again. Why not start now? 

Believe me, if you do, if you just take hold 
of your life and look at it in cold blood, and do 
not think of all the excuses that could be made 
for you—for what comfort are they really?— 


ON BEING A FAILURE 73 


you will triumph. You do not want excuses, 
do you? You want to triumph; you want to 
excel; you want to know that you have taken 
your life and made what you will out of it. Very 
well, then. Do not look for excuses. They do 
not really comfort. They do not really explain. 
Look at your life dispassionately, and see what 
can be done with it now. 

Suppose you are going to give up your job. 
Suppose you have only another month of it. 
Suppose in a little while you are going to leave 
your home and go somewhere where you expect 
more congenial companionship than you have 
ever had; if you have only a day left of your work 
or your home, make that day a glorious thing. 
Put the whole of your power into it. You will 
find that having done that gives you such a sense 
of power that you will begin to know that there 
is a power in the universe that could make a 
success out of any life. 

That is what I believe. I believe there is power 
to make of any life a success. If you are forced 
to stay where you are, there is power enough in 
the universe for you to make out of that sordid, 
cramped, uninteresting life, something absolutely 
glorious. 

The more I think of Christ on the cross, the 
more I am penetrated by the sense that he must 
have felt he had failed. You perhaps will retort, 
“Yes, hut then he had not.’ True, he had not 


74 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


but I think he felt he had. I do not believe that 
anything short of that shattering sense that 
everything had failed could have wrung from 
Christ that awful cry, ‘‘My God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?’’ The most that most of us could 
say is, ‘‘Why have I forsaken thee?”” But Christ, 
whose one appeal was to love, and whose one 
answer on Good Friday was—or so it seemed— 
that everything had failed, cried out, ‘‘Why hast 
thou forsaken me?”’ 

Do you know, although this is one of those 
things one hardly dares to speak about, I think 
Christ accepted his failure and trusted it to God 
to do what he could with it. ‘‘It is finished. 
Father, into thy hands I trust my spirit.” Do 
you, who strive, so many of you, in such difficult 
lives, who have so much, some of you, to contend 
with, do you also believe that, if you trust your 
spirit to God, power will come into your life which 
will transfigure it? 

You have the power of God to help you in all 
those difficulties and perplexities, that devastating 
sense of failure, of advancing age, perhaps, of 
passing time, of lost opportunity, of spoilt life. 
The power of God can triumph over all that and 
make of it something glorious. It is about us, 
as the energy of the sun is about us, that streams 
past this world of ours, and we do not use a bil- 
lionth part of it. So is it with the power of God. 
It strearns past us, and we do not use one billionth 


ON BEING A FAILURE 75 


part of it, but if, setting aside all our regrets, all our 
excuses, we were to begin once more the battle, we 
should find the power of God coming to us to 
triumph. 

God grant it to you. God grant it to us all. 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 


HERE are no easy ways of being good. I 
could preach a very short sermon to-night! 
But there are easy ways of feeling good, and I 
am rather up against them just now. There are 
ways, quite easy ways, of feeling good, of pre- 
serving one’s self-respect, of preserving the respect 
of others, and even believing that one is being 
good. 

Most of us want to be good. Almost everyone 
perhaps. I believe Mr. Clutton Brock is right 
when he says that goodness and beauty and truth 
are things naturally desired by human beings. 
We do not need to say why we want beauty, or 
why we want truth; the normal human being 
wants them, because they are fundamentally 
desirable—desirable in themselves. In just the 
same way nine hundred and ninety-nine people 
out of a thousand actually want to be good, but 
most of them do not want it to the exclusion of 
everything else. We want it, but we want other 
things as well. And when we think of wanting 
to be good, we are rather inclined, I think, to 
think of the exciting side of being good—the emo- 

76 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 77 


tion, and the vision, and the thrill, the excitement, 
the heroism, the romance. 

Moreover, most of us want to preserve our 
self-respect. It is difficult to preserve one’s 
self-respect unless one thinks one is at least as 
good as other people, and unless one can believe 
that one does really, on the whole, want to be 
good. And there are ways—quite easy ways— 
of achieving all these things. 

The thrill, and the vision, and the romance, 
and even the self-respect are quite easy to attain. 
You can feel good by going to church and singing 
sentimental hymns. The more sentimental they 
are, generally speaking, I think, the more good 
you feel. Hymns about being sawn asunder, 
slain with the sword; hymns about your intense 
desire to die and go to heaven; hymns about the 
awful weariness of life that you feel, sung in a 
constant succession in church, will send you away 
in that spirit of exhausted emotions and con- 
sequent crossness which is thought suitable after 
a great spiritual experience. Unfortunately, for 
us, Mr. Martin Shaw has torn that pleasure from 
a great many of us, and converted it into a sorrow. 
I used to enjoy these things as much as any body, 
and I cannot now. But I can well remember the 
joy of singing sentimental Rites and feeling as 
good as gold. 

Then there is another way. If Mr. Martin 
Shaw, or anyone else, has taken from you that 


78 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


pleasure, you can feel something of the same 
thrill, not quite so easily but with an even greater 
sense of superiority, by doing what people call 
‘‘worshipping under the blue dome of heaven.” 
These people, I believe, are now very generally 
known as “‘blue domers.’’ They eschew churches 
and places where other people meet, and go out 
into the country instead. They sit on top of a 
hill and worship under the blue dome of heaven. 
I have done that too; and I trust I shall do it 
again. The best time to do it is on Sunday, some 
time between six and seven o’clock, because then 
you can almost always hear church bells in the 
distance and reflect on the fact that you are not 
going to church and that quite a large number of 
mentally deficient people are. There is nothing 
that adds more to a sense of goodness than that 
feeling. A very distinguished English divine 
remarked once, when he heard the church bells in 
the distance, that the one pleasure that never 
palled was the pleasure of not going to church. 
And when you can combine with that the feeling 
that you are engaged in something far superior, 
then naturally there is no limit to the goodness 
that you can feel. 

I belong to both these schools, or I did, and I 
am still something of a blue domer. I wish we 
could arrange either the weather or the churches 
so that when there really was a blue dome— 
which there has not been very often this month— 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 79 


one could go and worship God there. Certainly 
there are times when one is the better for worship- 
ping him alone and in the beauty of nature rather 
than elsewhere. But it is apt to add to the feeling 
that it is quite easy to be good. 

Then, again, it is quite easy, I think, to pre- 
serve one’s self-respect. Perhaps some of you 
do not know how to do that, so I will tell you, 
and you will not be able to say you came to 
church for nothing to-night! The easy way to 
do it is always to keep an open mind about every- 
thing. Goafter every new religion, read every new 
book, discuss every new question and every 
old one, and all the time suspend your judgment 
and keep anopen mind. Itisa highly respectable 
attitude and it saves you an infinity of trouble 
because, you see, you need never act. Your 
mind is still open, your judgment is still suspended, 
and while you compliment yourself on the intel- 
lectual integrity which forbids you to come to a 
hasty conclusion, you need—indeed, you must 
—do nothing. You take no risks; you make no 
mistakes; you fall into none of those ridiculous 
misadventures which befall people who make up 
their minds. Neither are you forced to reflect 
that perhaps you would not act even if you had 
made up yourmind. You can cherish throughout 
life the pleasant delusion that you would have 
acted like a hero if only you had been able to 
decide what to do. You can marvel that other 


80 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


people, who do seem to have decided, are so often 
deplorably cowardly about acting. You would 
not be so; you, if you had made up your mind, 
would immediately act upon it. But you cannot 
make up your mind. Your judgment is in sus- 
pense. 

So, if you are interested in social reform, or in 
Christianity, or in any great question, you go 
from book to book and from conference to con- 
ference, always with an open mind, always trying 
to decide what is the right thing to aim at and 
the right thing to do. I have heard people say 
over and over again—people who never do one 
single thing, good or bad—‘‘I only want to do 
what is right, but I cannot see what is right.” I 
often think, ‘‘How fortunate youare!”’ -If you had 
had seen what was right, perhaps you would have 
to do.it; and if you did not do it you would 
have had to face the fact that you are a coward 
and a skulker. How fortunate you are that you 
have such an open mind, that you can never 
decide just what zs the right thing to do! 

I sometimes think that books and study circles 
and conferences are to some of us as much a form 
of dope as a sentimental hymn. As long as we 
are going to conferences about social questions, 
we convince ourselves that at least we are doing 
our best to see what is the right thing to do; 
though, it is true, we rush from one conference 
to another conference and yet are never able to 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 81 


make up our minds. We go from leader to leader, 
we bewail the inability of modern prophets to 
give usa lead at all. At the end of the conference 
or the sermon, or the book, or the discussion, we 
still do not know how to act. 

The truth is that it is difficult to act. It is 
hard to act; it is hard to be good. It is much 
easier to preserve your self-respect. If we make 
up our minds on what has to be done, we may 
make a mistake; or we may find ourselves un- 
willing to act after all—and that would be extra- 
ordinarily unpleasant! We may be faced with 
the fact that we are really stupid, or cowardly, 
or slothful. For it is extraordinarily hard to be 
good, although it is so easy to feel good. ‘‘The 
kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hid in 
a field, the which, when a man hath found, he 
hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all 
that he hath and buyeth that field.’’? 

“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a mer- 
chant man, seeking goodly pearls: who when he 
had found one pearl of great price, went and sold 
all that he had, and bought it.” 

It really is no use trying to get the kingdom of 
heaven for less. All these things I have spoken 
of are helps—not the bad hymns, but the good 
ones; the sky, and nature, and the conferences, 
where you meet with your fellow men and women 
who are trying to find the way to do what is right; 

t Matthew XIII. 


82 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


but none of them will ever be able to find a way 
for you that is easy—for there is no such way. 

That is why so often we say our leaders have 
not found a way for us; they have not found us 
an easy way, and because we cannot help hoping 
that after all we shall find it possible to do good 
and to save the world, to redeem it without having 
to “‘sell all that we have”’ and pay the price, we 
go on muttering that we cannot make up our 
minds. You are prepared, and I am, too, to give 
something. I would give perhaps, quite a good 
deal; but not all, not everything. So we go from 
conference to conference and from class to class 
and from book to book, hoping that at last we 
shall find a way which will not make too great a 
demand on us; which will not ask for that interior 
act of entire self-renunciation which is so hard. 
Perhaps some conjuring trick will make this 
possible for us; or if not, perhaps we shall not be 
asked for quite so high a price. 

How human it is! So we go on hoping that 
somebody will find for us an easy way. The new 
psychology, or the new religion, or the new 
thought, or the new philosophy. All of them, 
believe me, have something to say to us. There 
is not one that has not some message. But you 
are hoping, and I am hoping that that message 
will be a way in which we can be good, a way in 
which we can make the world better, and not 
have to give too much for it. 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 83 


I wrote a book some time ago called ‘‘Sex and 
Common Sense,’’ which had in it a chapter illus- 
trating just the kind of point I am trying to make 
to-night. I was dealing with a difficulty that 
faces a great many people, especially the women 
of this generation, who are not able, within the 
four walls of our moral code, to satisfy the sex 
side of their nature. I said that it was possible 
so to use the creative instinct (which is what the 
sex instinct really is) on another plane. I said 
it was possible to transmute this tremendous 
impulse, this hunger of sex, and use it in another 
way, on a plane which instead of being both 
Spiritual and physical, as sex love ought to be, 
must be spiritual only. I claimed that it was 
possible for a life based on this belief to be joyful 
and full and rich and fertile; that it is not necessary 
for us to resign ourselves to a life that is narrow 
and cramped and sterile but that, in the deepest 
sense of the word, it could be fruitful and glorious 
and joyful. I pointed to our Lord as an instance 
of one who had transmuted the whole of his 
creative power into a spiritual energy so great 
that no one could say of him that he was not a 
Lover, since he was the greatest Lover the world 
had ever seen. JI claimed that, in their degree, 
Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, 
Theresa of Spain had done, and other men and 
women can do, the same thing. Well, then, 
people begin to write to me about this book and 


84 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


say, ‘‘This is a very difficult task! What are 
men, shattered or impoverished by the war— 
women denied their natural satisfaction—to do 
with their sex instincts? Miss Royden says, 
‘Transmute it into something on another plane.’ 
That is not an answer! It may be possible for 
the exceptional man and woman, but we do not 
think it is very useful of Miss Royden to point 
the ordinary man and woman to Christ, and say, 
‘He was able to do it; so can you.” The ordinary 
person is not a Christ, a Francis, a Joan of Arc, 
and such advice, though doubtless, very beautiful, 
is for the exceptional person. It is no answer at 
all to most of us.” 

It is no answer if you are looking for an easy 
answer; yet it is the only answer that it is possible 
to give. There is no other answer; there is no 
other way out. None. This is the way out. 
Did I ever pretend that it was an easy way? It 
is not easy to turn any of your natural instincts 
out of the normal, natural channel and force them 
into another. If you think there is an easy path, 
go and look for it. But I warn you beforehand 
there is no such path. You can let your powér 
run to waste if you like. You can leave the 
world just a few degrees worse than it was because 
you lived in it, instead of a few degrees better. 
You can do that, but that isnot a way out. That 
does not solve any difficulty. 

Someone comes to me and asks, ‘‘Show me 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 85 


what is the right thing to do,” and I show them 
that path and they say, ‘‘That is not possible.”’ 
What they mean is, ‘‘That is not easy.” Well, 
it is not easy. God forbid that I should ever 
deceive anyone into thinking that it iseasy. But 
it is glorious, it is joyful, it is inspiring. It is not 
easy; that I never promised. In your physical 
nature there is sex; and if you do not use the 
sexual energy in the normal, physical way, the 
power that is there, the vitality, is absorbed into 
your system in such a way that it gives power 
and vitality to you. That is a physiological fact. 
But by no degree of continence of body or chastity 
of mind will all that power be taken up into your 
body. Some of it must be wasted, and that is 
hard for you to bear. There is not any way by 
which that can be made perfectly easy to control. 
It is precisely the same if I speak of your psycho- 
logical nature, of that instinct to create and to 
love, to give and to unite with those you love. 
That impulse, that energy makes you a vital 
being. Without it you are only half a hu- 
man being, whether you are a man or woman. 
With out:it you are defective, you are not 
fully alive. Very well. That power you can 
take up into your life and use it for all that is 
great and creative. Christ did ‘this. So have 
all the great saints in their degree. But not 
all the continence and chastity in the world 
will enable you to escape scot-free, not to suf- 


86 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


fer from that desire which you: cannot wholly 
transmute. 

That residue which you cannot find any way of 
using will hurt. Be it so. Cease to seek an 
escape. What made you think life could be 
easy? As long as you are a living human being 
it is not possible; but this is the only way out that 
is glorious and joyful and powerful and full of 
life. You cannot get power, power in the best 
sense I mean—cheaply. You cannot save the 
world at any easy rate. If it cost Christ the 
crucifixion, can you do it, do you think, more 
cheaply? No, you cannot. And the power that 
in your body follows from a truly chaste life, the 
power that in your spirit comes from a chastity 
of spirit, the power that enables you to love the 
world, to love all human beings with the great 
love of a great lover—do you think you can get 
that easily? Why, it is senseless, on the face of 
it, to think so! 

This world has been plunged into hell. Can 
you pick it out as though it were a little thing? 
The consequence of a war so hideous is hatred so 
vile and so cruel that the world is laid waste by 
it, and you expect someone to write a book and 
tell you how to escape the consequences easily! 
No, no! That is impossible. It is not easy, it is 
only joyful. 

Indeed all those new religions that preach to 
you that joy and happiness, health and love, and 


EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD 87 


all good and perfect gifts, come from God are 
right. They are most right to preach to you a 
gospel of joy. But this joy was at the heart of 
it an act of renunciation so complete that Christ 
could even liken it to the crucifixion. 

Go to some new class in psychology, or theoso- 
phy, or new thought, or higher thought, or what- 
ever you like to call it; and they will give to you 
a message of joy. They are all of them right. 
But did you ever know the leader of such a class 
or such a movement whose life, if you came to 
think of it, was not one long act of self-renuncia- 
tion? If they are full of joy, if they are full of 
power, it is because they have first denied their 
very selves. Therefore they are set free into the 
liberty of glory and joy of Christ. But this is 
not easy, and those deceive you who would 
persuade you that it is. 

“The good that I would I do not, and the 
evil that I would not, that I do.’’ These struggles 
go with us to the end, and for you to demand 
that it should be easy is vain. Do not shrink 
away from the fact that life hurts. ‘‘Not on 
plumes nor canopied in down the soul wins fame.”’ 
But if you accept that truth, there is no reason 
why any preacher in the world should hesitate 
to point out to you that what Jesus Christ achieved 
he calls us to achieve also. 

Those moralists, J am persuaded, are mistaken 
who say to us, ‘‘ You, of course, are not expected 


88 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


to be a great saint, nor to achieve any extra- 
ordinary thing.” Why should you not be a 
great saint? Why not? The power is there, 
the power of God, and it is contemptible to 
decide beforehand that for you some half measure, 
some half life, some half sacrifice is enough, No— 
‘fall of you are children of the most High,” and 
therefore to all it is possible to tread that path 
of self-renunciation which is the price of glory 
and joy and life. 


TEMPERAMENT 


HE triumph of human beings over nature 
has become such a common-place that it is 
almost impossible for us now to be surprised at 
anything that science can promise or perform. 
Many of us were more excited when we heard 
that M. Bleriot had flown over the Channel than 
we were when someone flew over the Atlantic 
Ocean, because science now advances with such 
strides and with such triumphant assurance of 
its power that we are bankrupt of astonishment. 
I was reminded when I was in America that 
Abraham Lincoln could not travel faster than 
the first Abraham that we ever heard of—unless 
a horse does go faster than a camel? To-day 
you can speak on one side of the Atlantic and 
have your voice carried across in a few seconds of 
time. News can be sent in that little space of 
time, which a hundred years ago took four or 
five months to cross the United States. This 
has become so commonplace to us that we hardly 
feel surprised. 

Science has taught us such an extraordinary 
mastery over the material world that we expect 
to triumph, and we forget that the whole of that 

89 


go LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


mastery is due to obedience, based on the con- 
viction of the ordinary man that he cannot escape 
scientific law. All great scientists have always 
known that. Before they were able to convince 
the ordinary person, they were wise if they kept 
their knowledge to themselves, or they would 
very likely be burnt or stoned as magicians! But 
when the ordinary person grasped the universal 
character of scientific law, there was at first a 
sense of profound depression. If you read the 
poets and the prose-writers, and the preachers, 
and even, sometimes, the scientists also, of the 
middle of the nineteenth century—men like 
Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, and even Huxley 
—you will be struck by the sense of despondency 
with which these men realised that we cannot 
escape scientific law. ‘The effect upon them was 
of paralysis. They felt that kind of fatalism, 
that dreary inability to alter things, or to mould 
their lives, or to have any freedom, which came 
of a “‘mechanical’”’ view of the universe. We 
ourselves, it seemed, were only parts of a great 
machine, and there came over the spirit of think- 
ing men and women a sense of helplessness and 
despondency. Huxley, in his ironical fashion, 
draws a mocking contrast between that early 
astronomy which taught that the stars were kept 
in their courses by celestial hands, and our present 
belief that they are kept there by the laws of 
gravitation. The impression one gets is that, 


TEMPERAMENT OL 


for him, as for the theologians and the poets and 
the dreamers, something of beauty and glory 
had passed away from the earth. One gets it 
still more strongly in the poetry of Matthew 
Arnold or Tennyson. Yet how strange it seems 
to us now that it should have been so! Because 
in fact, the discovery of scientific law—not merely 
by the genius and scientist but by the ordinary 
man and woman in the street—has resulted in 
setting us free, in giving us a power over that 
universe which is governed by law, which would 
have seetned to our forefathers simply miraculous. 

We can see millions of miles; we can hear across 
the world; we can throw our voice around the 
world; we can rise into the air; we can plunge 
beneath the sea; we can alter climates; we can 
change the face of the world. All this has become 
possible precisely because we know that the world 
is governed by unbreakable law. Knowledge, 
instead of making us slaves, has set us free. 

“‘The powers that be are ordained of God.” 
St. Paul, I suppose, was not thinking of scientific 
laws, and with much of what he says in this 
passage some of us would be tempted to disagree. 
But in the sense that we think of ‘‘law”’ to-night, 
how inspired it is! 


“‘ Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. 
For there is no power but of God: the powers that be 
are ordained of God. 


92 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


“Whosoever therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth 
the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall 
receive to themselves damnation.”’ 


Is not that scientific law? You must obey 
the great power which is expressed in what we 
call scientific law, and if you do not obey it, you 
break yourself. If you do obey, you gain almost un- 
believable power over the world in which you live. 

Later, and still very slowly, we have begun to 
realise that law is present not only in the ‘‘na- 
tural’’ universe, the material universe with which 
we are surrounded, but in human affairs also. 
The idea of law as an arbitrary thing which men 
could enact or suspend or repeal as they chose, 
is being gradually superseded by a scientific 
understanding of the fact that whatever you may 
do, there are certain laws in human affairs which 
cannot be broken: laws which to obey gives power, 
and to seek to disobey brings, as St. Paul puts 
it, ‘‘damnation.”’ 

We all to-day talk glibly enough about economic 
law. We have begun to realise that the old way 
in which Parliaments used to pass laws about 
prices and about wages was unsound, because 
they ignored fundamental laws; and if there are 
fundamental laws, it is as senseless for Parliament 
to sit there wasting time passing what it calls 
laws, violating these fundamental principles, 
as it would be for them to sit and pass laws against 


TEMPERAMENT 93 


the law of gravitation. Consequently, there has 
come to many, first of all, that sense of impotence 
and despair, that despondency which came to 
people when they first understood scientific law. 

We say sometimes, rather mournfully, that 
it is no use legislating or trying to change things 
very much: “‘you cannot fight against economic 
law.” The idea, as I said before, that there are 
fundamental principles which it is not in our 
power to change or escape has at last moved from 
our conception of the material world to our con- 
ception of our own human affairs. It has been 
followed, as before, with the sense of despondency, 
the fear that we cannot do very much because 
there are against us certain forces which we cannot 
escape. Why should there be despondency? 
Mr. Chesterton rightly says that if you jump 
over a precipice you do not break the law of 
gravitation. We could add, could we not, that 
if you fly in the air you do not break the law of 
gravitation. We can fly to-day because scientists 
and engineers have understood the laws which 
govern flight, and instead of trying to work against 
them the aviator is obeying them all the time, and 
because he obeys them he seems able to violate 
them. But there is no one person here who 
dreams that you really violate the law of gravita- 
tion when you fly in the air. The same argument 
applies to economics, but it has not yet been quite 
freely applied, because there are people to whom 


94 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


it is easier to resign themselves to things as they 
are than to make the necessary effort to find out 
along what lines and in what way we can get the 
power to change them. 

Most of us are in the same case with regard to 
that wonderful new science which I believe is 
going to mark an epoch—no, not to mark, but 
to make an epoch—in the advance of humanity. 
We have witnessed, in our generation, what is 
practically the birth of a new science. It is still 
very new. I believe it to be sometimes worship- 
ping false gods, and very often speaking a ridicu- 
lous language. But, I believe, as many of you 
do also, that the modern idea of psychology is 
practically a new science, that it deserves the 
name of science, precisely because it has grasped 
the fact that our minds also are governed by 
universal law. As I said, the lonely genius 
cannot really help us much, until we believe him. 
Saints and psychologists have always known 
these laws concerning human nature; but it is 
only in the twentieth century that ordinary 
people have grasped the implication, the meaning 
and the importance of the discovery that our 
minds, our temperaments, our characters, are 
also governed by law. It is that conviction, 
which modern psychologists have brought home 
to quite ordinary people, that I believe will be 
the starting-place of a new and great development 
of power and freedom in the human race. 


TEMPERAMENT 95 


“Now is our salvation nearer than when we 
believed.” Thus says St. Paul. These words 
seem to me more true, more wonderful to-day, 
than perhaps at any other time since he wrote 
them. 


Knowing the time, that it is high time to awake 
out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than 
when we believed. 

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us 
therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us 
put on the armour of light. 


It is light that enables us to direct our own 
powers, as it was light that gave us power over 
the world in which we live. It is light that 
modern psychology is bringing us to-day, the 
light which will enable us to conquer ourselves. 

Now, of course, in a sense, people have always 
conquered themselves, thank God. There has 
been a certain instinctive knowledge and also a 
highly trained and experienced knowledge among 
spiritual advisers, of the way in which people 
may direct themselves. But it is a tremendous 
advance when we ourselves begin to understand 
how the thing is done. 

We do not know to-day from what early form 
our great possession of wheat has come. We 
know that it must have been developed through 
ages and ages from some much less valuable and 


96 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


useful form. To know the exact way in which 
it was done would not make it any less wonderful, 
any less of a miracle. It is a cheap and foolish 
mind which to-day should think that because we 
are beginning to understand something of the 
processes by which a man may conquer himself, 
that process is less wonderful, less miraculous, 
less glorious. On the contrary, as Professor 
Thomson taught us, our wonder should increase; 
but with that wonder should come something of 
the determination to conquer, something of the 
assurance of ultimate conquest which has been 
the glory of the scientists of the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries. 

So, to-day, we are faced, all of us, with the 
necessity of ordering our own lives and con- 
quering our own temperaments. And we have, 
moreover, the assurance of the power to do so 
which was lacking to previous generations. Yet, 
here again, there arises first of all in the minds of 
many of us the sense of despondency. Because 
the psychologists will tell you exactly what your 
difficulties are, and why they come to be there, 
and how effect always follows cause, the first 
impression of many of those who read the subject 
is one of impotence. There is, of course, a certain 
school of teachers who give you the feeling that 
because you have a certain heredity, because 
certain things happened to your parents, because 
certain things happened to you when you were a 


TEMPERAMENT 97 


child, ill effects inevitably follow, and you are 
helpless in the power of these laws of psychology. 

The law of cause and effect has produced in you 
that weakness, that despondency, that irregular- 
ity, that dislocation of mind, and because you 
recognise it to be the effect of a cause and the 
cause has escaped your control—since it originated 
in your past life, or perhaps in your parents’ lives— 
therefore there comes to you something of that 
feeling of despondency which came with the first 
discovery of natural law. 

If our own minds are governed by law, if, 
because something terrible happened to you when 
you were a child, you now suffer your present 
trouble, what is the use of striving against it? 
You cannot remove it because its cause lies in the 
past. It is out of your control. It never was in 
your centrol. Or again, if there is in your present 
circumstances something that you cannot escape— 
you are doing the wrong work, or doing it under 
the wrong conditions, or some side of your nature 
is unfulfilled, your sex-instincts or your true 
vocation, and it is not possible—let us say—to 
alter these things, then you must suffer. If 
some power that is in you has to be suppressed 
it sets up in you a ferment and a revolt. Or 
again, if some check has been imposed on you in 
the past, it has set up in you a nervousness, an 
irritability, a weakness, a fear—anything you 
like that is troublesome and difficult—and the 


98 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


very fact that you know how it has happened 
only makes you feel helpless. Yet the result of 
knowledge should always be power, and always 
has been power when knowledge has become 
understanding. 

To know that the world is governed by laws 
that you cannot escape, to him who knows it 
may be paralysis, but to him who wnderstands 
it is freedom and power. So I am persuaded 
that those psychologists are most right and most 
prophetic who find in the knowledge they are able 
to give us not paralysis but power. To know 
that something has happened to you which has 
upset your nervous balance may, in the first 
instance, be paralysing; but when you understand 
all, it will mean power, for you are now working 
in the light. You can see what has happened 
to you. You can understand it. You°can, if 
you will, take the same, or nearly the same, 
detached view of your own character and your 
own temperament as you could of someone else’s. 
That is science indeed. 

That is why I believe that there will come to 
this generation a power to change human nature, 
or if not-to change it—for that, I think, a little 
begs the question—to redirect its energies, to use 
them in the right way, to use them creatively 
instead of wastefully, which will make the twen- 
tieth century one of the greatest pages in human 
history. 


TEMPERAMENT 99 


But many of us neither believe in our power 
nor welcome it. Is it unfair to say that the 
rich man sometimes welcomes the fact that 
“‘economic law’’ justifies him in accepting as 
inevitable unemployment or poverty? Is it un- 
fair to say that we are sometimes ready to wel- 
come the assumption that psychological knowledge 
justifies us in resignation to our temperaments? 
It is so much easier, is it not, to be resigned than 
to fight? There has arisen a kind of ‘‘Man- 
chester School” of psychologists, like the Man- 
chester School of economists who said there were 
certain economic laws which we must allow to 
work themselves out without interference, and 
then everything would come right. So I some- 
times think that there is a kind of Manchester 
School of psychologists who say there are certain 
laws which will work themselves out, and we 
can and need do nothing. Can we not? Need 
we not? I think we both need and can. It is 
not merely by knowing scientific law that you 
overcome the world: it is by applying it. Now, 
therefore, let us apply the knowledge that psy- 
chology has given us. 

Do you not often find yourself saying, when 
people complain of something you have done or 
been or said, ‘‘Well, you see, I am like that!’’ 
Somebody makes every breakfast in his house 
—I say advisedly ‘‘his house,’’ though it is 
certainly sometimes ‘“‘her house’’—a nightmare, 


100 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


by coming down with a face of sulky rage, 
and looking out for everything that can annoy 
him; and if you complain, he will say, with com- 
placency, ‘‘I am never at my best in the early 
morning.’’ He will see to it that no one else 
within the radius of his influence is at his or her best 
either! Why should the cloud of his preposterous 
depression blacken everyone else’s . morning? 
Because he is ‘‘like that.’’ It is true: he is like 
that. But need he be like that? 

There are people who are given to violent 
explosions of temper, and when the shattered 
victims of their rage protest, they say compla- 
cently, “‘Oh, I am like that, you know! But it 
doesn’t last. It is all over in a second.’ Their 
household is a stricken field. For them it is all 
over in a second, and they are genuinely surprised 
and even hurt at the fact that it is not quite over 
with the rest of the household. 

There are people who take the opposite line. 
With them it is not over in a second. Quite the 
contrary. ‘They cannot ever forget some trifling 
error, some unintended slight, some unconscious 
mood. They cannot forget it because they are ‘‘so 
sensitive.’’ They are ‘‘like that’’—so sensitive 
that a word may blacken the whole day for them. 
But ought it to blacken the whole day for them? 
Ought you to be so insanely sensitive that you 
must sulk a day or a week if someone hurts you? 
Do you realise—I am sometimes tempted to 


TEMPERAMENT IOI 


wonder if any of us realise—the devastating effect 
on others of what we are pleased to call our 
‘‘moods’’? 

To be moody is the temperament of many 
people, but when the mood has passed for them, 
its shadow has fallen so deep upon their friends 
and relations that it cannot quickly pass. Then 
the moody one experiences surprise and regret 
that others should be so sulky and so unrea- 
sonable! Few of us realise how hard it is 
to have the sunshine blackened by our depres- 
sion, by our mood, which we could conquer if we 
would. 

What a lesson in the art of victory is contained 
in the passage I read just now from Mr. Cherry 
Garrard’s book! 

‘““Temperamentally he (Scott) was a weak man 
and very easily might have been an irritable 
autocrat.”” Because he would not be an irritable 
autocrat, the very fact of his moods and his 
difficulties gave him, I am certain, a power over 
fate, over circumstances, over other men, which 
began with the assertion of this power over him- 
self. Those of you who are naturally ‘‘tempera- 
mental’? (to use a much abused word), who are 
moody and unequal in spirit, who are irritable 
and hate yourselves for it, should find in such a 
story as this of Scott’s, a magnificent inspiration; 
for the impression that one gets from it is that it 
was by the very fact of his fighting with his 


102 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


difficulties that he achieved such power. Men 
came to love him and to follow him because he 
had gone through that, and with such magnificent 
determination had conquered it. ‘‘Naturally so 
weak, naturally so peevish, highly strung, irritable 
depressed, moody’’—that is the man who goes to 
the South Pole, where conditions impose a nervous 
strain so great that, as Mr. Cherry Garrard says 
_ elsewhere, it was impossible for the best friends 
to speak to one another for days at a time, because 
they were so afraid of saying something out- 
rageous. The nervous strain on all was terrific 
and this man who, by nature, was peevish, highly 
strung, irritable, depressed, moody, was recog- 
nised by all those others as their natural leader 
and their king. In a company of men which 
contained a man like Dr. Wilson, a man like 
Captain Bowers, whose natural temperaments 
were serene, calm, tactful, cheerful, indomitable— 
even in a company where two such men were to 
be found, Scott was recognised as the strongest of 
them all. ‘‘We never knew how strong he was,” 
writes Mr. Garrard, ‘‘till we saw him there, lying 
dead.’ The last to die, the one who held out 
longest. It is perhaps only when one realises 
what men like Wilson and Bowers were that one 
realises what a king Scott must have been, to be 
as Mr. Garrard says, ‘‘the most dominant char- 
acter of our community.’’ I am persuaded that 
it was precisety because he had to conquer these 


TEMPERAMENT 103 


apparently humiliating defects of moodiness and 
irritability and nervous strain and despondency, 
and that at the last, even, he had them writhing 
under his heel but not killed, that he so dominated 
that little community. This man would not 
admit that because a thing was his temperament, 
it was therefore to be his fate. ‘‘Your tempera- 
ment is not your fate,” it has been said. ‘‘Tem- 
perament decides our trials; it does not decide 
our destiny.” 

You perhaps find it hard to work with others; 
you are one of those capable and efficient people 
who say, ‘‘I would rather do a thing myself than 
trouble other people with it.”” Yes, but that does 
not help the other people to do all that they 
might, does it? You had to be taught once. 
Someone had to be patient with you, and to be 
unable to be patient with others is not something 
that is an inalienable part of your temperament. 
It is something that you have to conquer. 

Or you find it terribly difficult not to be irritable. 
I feel sure that in twentieth century life there is 
a very much greater nervous strain on all of us 
than has been the case in the past. Many of us, 
therefore, are nervous and irritable and highly 
strung. What then? Then we are called upon 
to have the greater power over ourselves; to 
understand our dangers and our difficulties, to 
trace them to their source, to deal with them 
wisely, but always with the assurance of triumph, 


104 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


which is the great gift of science to twentieth 
century people. ‘‘I am like that.” Yes, you 
are like that. What are you going to do about it? 
That is the question that modern psychology is 
putting to you and to me, and it puts it with that 
kind of assurance that there is something that 
you can do about it which will make all the dif- 
ference between working in the dark and in the 
light. 

Knowledge means power, and knowledge is 
given to us in full measure. Let us work while 
it is day. While the light comes to us, let us go 
forward. It may be that to this generation there 
has come one of those great and dramatic moments 
when all Humanity makes a forward stride, be- 
cause for the first time not the saint only, or the 
scholar or the genius, but you and I are dealing 
with our own temperaments no longer in the dark 
but in the light. 


LONELY PEOPLE 


HAT ancient Latin saying that I read just 
now is painfully true, is it not? ‘‘A great 
city, a great solitude.’”’ I do not think there are 
lonelier places in the world than great cities, if one 
has no friends. ‘‘For little do men perceive what 
solitude is, nor how far it extendeth; for a crowd 
is not company, and faces are but a gallery of 
pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where 
there is no love.’”” People may come up to London 
from their homes, and find here six or seven 
millions of people, and no friends. To those 
people we should all of us try to extend our friend- 
ship. All of us should remember what a lonely 
place London is, and be on the look-out for people 
who come up here, whether young or old, and find 
themselves without any friends. One of the chief 
purposes of our Guildhouse ought to be, I think, 
that it should help people to make friends with 
one another. 

It is unnatural not to have friends. Another 
great writer has said that man is “‘naturally a 
political animal.” (He did not mean in the 
sense that an Englishman is a political animal. 

105 


106 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


I think Englishmen are political animals, and 
Englishwomen too.) He meant in the sense 
that they naturally live together. The word 
‘‘political’’ meant, to him, belonging to a com- 
munity, and it is natural for men to live in cities 
or communities; unnatural, as he says, ‘‘either 
god-like or beast-like’” to want to live alone. 
That is true, is it not? in the sense that it is un- 
natural to be solitary, and one can see by the 
effect that it has on people how bad it is for them: 
how people who have for long been lonely get a 
kind of stiffness in their spiritual joints. They 
cannot easily let themselves go; they cannot easily 
give themselves away, even when they want to. 
They cannot express their desire for love; they 
cannot express their own love when they feel it. 
They find it difficult to form the habit of being 
at ease and natural with other human beings. 
Those who want to make friends with lonely 
people should realise that. I would urge them 
very strongly to remember that it is very un- 
natural not always to have had friends. Nature 
plants us in the middle of a family. Weare born 
into families in order that we may have human 
society round us, a permanent. society, a stable 
home, brothers and sisters as well as parents. All 
these things are ‘‘wealth’” to human nature, 
because they make us truly human. Therefore 
do not be discouraged if you find a person who 
has long been lonely, difficult to make friends 


LONELY PEOPLE 107 


with. Do not be impatient; do not think you 
can easily break down the walls of their reserve. 
They have built round themselves—unwillingly— 
a kind of wall, in order that they may hide their 
solitude behind it, and you cannot easily break 
it down. You must not even try hurriedly to 
break down the reserve of any human spirit. 
Because people have been lonely in the past, it 
almost inevitably follows that they will find it 
difficult now to form the habit of making friends. 
Consider that that lonely soul may have, as I 
shall show a little later on, some gift that humanity 
is the poorer for lacking; but that he or she cannot 
easily give it, because to give it is to give himself 
away, and the lonely person has made almost a 
virtue of never giving himself away for fear what 
he gives may be scorned. It is one of the saddest 
things about loneliness that it makes a natural 
demeanour and buoyancy impossible—literally 
_ impossible. The sensitive spirit inevitably cramps 
itself or is cramped by that unnatural loneliness, 
and always, in making friends with the lonely, 
remember that it takes reverence and respect and 
a very real love for human nature to enable us 
to ‘‘make friends” with anyone. 

People sometimes, I think, offer their friendship 
in the insufferable way in which others offer 
charity! You know there was once a man with 
whom no girl would dance because he said he 
always made a point of dancing with wallflowers! 


108 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


Consequently he could find in the end no one to 
dance with at all. There are some people who 
go about in an almost professional way trying to 
be kind to the lonely, in such a way that the 
lonely would rather perish than accept their 
kindness. We need that kind of reverence for 
the human spirit which makes one gentle and 
willing to wait, and involves always a respect for 
the personality of others quite as great as we 
expect other people to give to ours. 

I speak for a moment, first of all, about lonely 
people, but I want chiefly to speak to-night to 
lonely people. The worst punishment that hu- 
manity now tolerates for the criminal is solitary 
confinement, a punishment so dread and so in- 
human that it breaks the spirit and sometimes 
unhinges the reason of the person who is sub- 
jected to it. Since the militant suffragists and 
conscientious objectors have been in prison, they— 
being.more articulate, more able to express them- 
selves than ordinary convicts—have been able to 
tell us a little of what prison life means. Those 
of you who have read, and I hope most of you 
have, such a book as ‘‘English Prisons To-day,” 
by Mr. Stephen Hobhouse and Mr. A. Fenner 
Brockway, will remember that terrible descrip- 
tion of the effect of this apparently comparatively 
harmless punishment of solitary confinement. 
There is no physical torture, and yet solitude is 
so profoundly unnatural to the human spirit that 


LONELY PEOPLE 109 


those who have gone through it, or who know 
people who have gone through it, say that it is 
impossible to describe its terrors. And there are 
people, not within prison walls, who seem to walk 
about the earth under a perpetual sentence of 
solitary confinement; people whose spirits are so 
lonely that they seem as though they cannot make 
friends. 

Either they cannot make friends or they cannot 
keep them. I do not know which is worse, but 
either is very bitter to the human spirit. To what 
is it due? It is due sometimes, I know, to cir- 
cumstances, to some solitary position in life, 
some difficulty in one’s surroundings. But far 
oftener it is due to something in the spirit of the 
person himself, some attitude towards life which 
imposes upon him this terrible sentence of solitary 
confinement. It is not the lack of fine qualities— 
quite the contrary; some of these lonely spirits 
have qualities so fine, abilities so rare, that it is 
inexplicable to the onlooker that they should be 
lonely. Yet they are so. Their chief sorrow in 
life is their loneliness, their inability to make 
really close and satisfying friendships. And these 
people, I repeat, are often people of great gifts, 
not only of intellectual gifts but of moral gifts, 
people of courage, people of character, people 
who carry weight where they go, who have in- 
tellectual powers and strong character, people 
who can do things and who are of value in the 


110 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


world, from whom you cannot if you would 
withhold your admiration. Yet there is over 
their lives this terrible shadow: they cannot make 
friends, or if they make friends they lose them. 
Yet they desire friends. For such persons as I 
have described, being fine people and gifted people, 
desire friends with a hunger which makes their 
solitude heartrending. It is a source of so much 
unhappiness that one cannot help asking oneself 
what is the cause. It is true that London is a 
lonely place. It is true that if you come up to 
London without friends, it may be terribly dif- 
ficult to make any. And yet there are people 
who will make friends anywhere. 

You all know about Francois de Bonnivard, 
the Prisoner of Chillon; you probably learned 
about him when you were at school. He made 
friends with a spider! He was imprisoned for 
life, and he made friends with a spider that came 
up the wall of the cell. Other life-prisoners have 
made friends with rats or mice. I think of such 
people as having such a genius for friendship 
that they cannot help making friends. Put a 
man like that alone in a cell, cut him off from all 
human intercourse, and he will make friends with 
a rat! Well, put such a man in London, and 
however lonely London may be he will make 
friends. There are*people whom you may put 
into any kind of surroundings and they will make 
friends. I have in mind a friend of mine whose 


LONELY PEOPLE III 


circumstances have all been against her in the 
way of making friendships. I think that most 
people living her life would have lived a lonely 
life. She has never perhaps been able to choose 
her friends, and yet she has many friends, because 
she has a genius for friendships. It was only 
when she herself once said to me that she envied 
my going to college when I was a girl, because, 
as she said, ‘‘at college you have such opportunities 
of making friends,” that I realised this. I said, 
‘Well, you have no reason to complain on that 
score, you have so many friends.’”’ She said, 
‘Yes, it is true, but I made the friends that were 
there. I do not think I ever had a chance of 
choosing my friends.” 

Is not that really the heart of the trouble? 
We should make friends with the friends who 
are there. So often lonely people will tell you 
in the end that they do not care to make friends 
with such and such another person who is also 
lonely and wants friends: that is not the kind of 
friend they want: they have in their mind some 
high ideal of the sort of person that they want for 
afriend. Is that really a high ideal of friendship, 
or is it a high ideal of your own deserts? I speak 
with feeling, because I remember myself desiring 
friends intensely and being absolutely unable to 
make friends. I marvelled at myself, and could 
not understand it, and thought to myself, with 
ineffable complacency, that it was because I had 


I12 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


such a high ideal of friendship that nobody that 
I had met yet had ever come up to it. I see now 
that my “‘high ideal’”’ was simply a form of con- 
ceit. I thought that that was the only kind of 
friendship that was good enough for me. I did 
not realise that making friends is a habit, and 
that you must practise it wherever you get the 
chance! 

Making friends is a habit. It is the habit of 
giving yourself away, and the idea that you 
must not give yourself away is the real root of 
essential loneliness. Leaving out for a moment 
those people (and indeed I do not think there are 
many) whose circumstances make it impossible 
for them to make friends, I say of the average 
lonely person that ninety-nine times out of a 
hundred their loneliness comes from a deep refusal 
to give themselves away. ‘They call it reserve or 
self-respect, and say they will not cast their pearls 
before swine; but, indeed—I speak to those 
lonely people who know perhaps at this hour 
what I have known in the past, the unspeakable 
bitterness of solitude—it is really that you have 
not made the habit or recognised the necessity 
of giving yourself away. 

There are in the world what William James 
called ‘‘sky-blue souls,’ people who make friends 
as easily as they breathe, people whose souls are 
of that celestial hue that there is no shadow in 
them at all—‘‘no flapping of unclean wings about 


LONELY PEOPLE 113 


their cells’’; people to whom the love of their 
kind is so natural, so easy, that it goes out to 
everyone. To such happy souls all that I shall 
say to-night must seem curiously morbid and 
unnatural and laboured. But it is not the fault 
of us others that we are naturally introspective 
and self-centred and morbid. To be so may 
become a fault, but in the first instance it is per- 
haps an inheritance, something that we did not 
choose to have. If we could have chosen, we 
should have been one of those sky-blue souls who 
easily make friends! But we are not, and to be 
as we are is not a sin, in the sense that we are 
responsible for it. No one is responsible. It 
is not reasonable even to blame our ancestors; 
they may blame their ancestors in turn! But 
there it is, that temperament, naturally self- 
centred, naturally self-conscious, naturally in- 
troverted, introspective. To say to such people, 
‘Just forget yourselves’”’ is to add bitterness to 
their sufferings. It is precisely there that they 
find the difficulty! And yet if one could make a 
habit of giving, if one could realise, as a constant 
state of mind, that in friendship you have to give 
something that is more than your help, your 
service, your time; it is yourself that you have to 
give, it is possible in time to overcome that self- 
centred, introspective view which makes it seem 
a kind of outrage to give ourselves away to anyone. 

Make friends with those who are there for you 


114 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


to make friends with. Do not be searching the 
horizon for an ideal friend. Are you an ideal 
person that you should have an ideal friend? 
What would you do with an ideal friend if you 
had one? Disappoint him all the time! Make 
friends with the people who are there to make 
friends with. They will be better than spiders 
after all, or, at least, if there are some animal- 
lovers here who would prefer a spider—and I am 
sure there are many who will prefer a dog—still, 
believe me, they are wrong. The human being 
with whom you may make friends has much 
more to give you, infinitely more than you suspect, 
and perhaps much more than you deserve. But 
you ask yourself, do you not? when you try to 
make friends, whether such a person is worth 
making a friend of, worth the sacrifice of your 
reserve, and whether you perhaps are worthy to 
be their friend? It is all so self-conscious, so 
laboured, so artificial. Yes, I know, but it is 
the beginning of a habit which will afterwards 
become like second nature. ‘‘For use almost 
can change the stamp of nature.’”’ It is possible 
to learn by practice the habit of friendship; but 
it must be practised on the people who are there; 
you must not go round the world looking for 
someone; there are the people around you now; 
those are the people for you to make friends with. 
It is again and again against a blank refusal to 
make friends with the people who are there that 


LONELY PEOPLE 115 


I find all my attempts to help the lonely, as far 
as I am concerned, have broken down. People 
would like to make friends with some great person, 
some very good person; to them they feel that 
they can give themselves. They think perhaps, 
though they do not say, that such an exchange 
will be a fair one! But say to them, ‘‘Well, I 
am so glad to have met you who are lonely, be- 
cause Mr. Jones over the way is very lonely,” and 
you find at once that Mr. Jones is not the person 
they want to make friends with. Is it not then, 
their fault if they are lonely? 

With all the difficulties in the world before 
you, of circumstances and environment, the 
fundamental difficulty lies, not in London, not 
in the size or greatness of it, not in your poverty 
or difficulties, but in yourself, because you have 
never formed the habit of giving anything of 
yourself at all to people, until you have weighed 
them in the balance and felt quite sure that they 
were worthy of so great a gift. All the world is 
filled with human beings who are your potential 
friends, and all the time that you live without 
friends you are making more and more difficult 
for yourself the habit of friendship. When you 
make a friend at last, the same kind of tempera- 
ment is easily very jealous and very exclusive, 
and being so, it kills the friendship made. For 
love will not tolerate that kind of possessiveness. 
Love is of all things the one that must be most 


116 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


free to give itself where it will. Because a person 
has become your friend, is that a reason why he 
should have no other friend? Are you enough to 
fill a person’s heart? He is enough, you say; 
such-and-such a person is enough for me: why 
cannot I be enough for him? He is enough for 
you, she is enough for you, because your little 
heart is so narrow, because you have cramped 
your mind and restricted your interests in your 
solitude until you cannot take in more than one 
person. Do you desire that to be true of your 
friend also? Could you wish that you should be 
enough for your friend, that he or she should have 
no other friend, no other interests, at least none 
comparable to yourself? Do you not see how 
you create your own loneliness? You desire to 
impose upon your friends the narrow limitations 
that govern your own heart. You cannot bear 
to see them as fond of anyone else as they are of 
you, giving them more time, seeming perhaps to 
give them more interest. You should rejoice 
that they have escaped from those narrow prison 
bars behind which you walk. Is that too hard? 
But, reflect: narrowness kills love, because it is 
love’s opposite. It destroys the very heart of 
love, and so that loneliness which for an hour or 
a year you thought was gone for ever, because 
you had found a friend, returns, because either 
your friend is weary of your perpetual demands 
that you should be enough for him who is enough 


LONELY PEOPLE 117 


for you, or the friendship is endured rather as an 
act of duty and conscience than with that joyful 
love that you desire. Is a love shared with other 
people not enough for you? Well, if it is not 
enough, it is not because you love your friend 
so much, it is because of your hungry, avid 
egotism. If you even desire to swallow up that 
person’s affection in your own, is it not true that 
your loneliness is your fault? 

If you look at the world to-day (and forget 
yourself for a moment) what will you say the 
world is dying for? Love! The world perishes 
with hate, it dies for lack of love, it is sick and 
poisoned with hate, and what it needs is the kind 
of love that God gives, divine love, unexacting 
love, giving all. You say that you are lonely 
and have no one to love, and in the same breath 
you must admit that the world perishes for lack 
of precisely that—love. Do you not see what a 
contradiction it is? You and I have complained 
that we have no one who really desires our friend- 
ship and our love. We felt that our love was 
worth so much, that our friendship would have 
been such a gift. Yes, and in a sense we are 
right. The real love of any human being is a 
great gift. But in this world that starves for 
love, will you say that you can find no one to 
whom to give any love, no one who needs it? 
Why, all the world is dying for lack of it! And 
yet there are people, hundreds, thousands, perhaps 


118 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


millions who are lonely, because they will not love 
the people all around them who are also craving 
for love. They look for someone else who is more 
worthy. 

If God were looking for some love that would 
be worthy of him he would never be loved at all, 
would he? He takes any kind of love, and I 
believe he rejoices in it. I think one of the most 
striking things I ever read about the love of God 
was in an unpublished essay about the joy that a 
mother feels when she knows that her child has 
learnt to recognise her. The writer, who was 
herself a mother, said, ‘‘I remember when my 
first child first knew me. He only knew that I 
was to him a source of food, but I shall never 
forget the rapture with which I realised that he 
did know that.’’ And she went on, ‘‘I think 
that our love of God is often no more understand- 
ing than that baby’s love of its mother. And 
yet I can imagine the joy that it is to God that 
we recognise him at all.” 

The kind of love which makes God welcome 
from us any kind of response, the love which does 
not wait, any more than this woman’s love for 
her child waited, for recognition, but goes out 
first of all, is that for which the world is longing. 
‘*Beloved, herein is love, not that we loved God, 
but that he first loved us.”’ That is the beginning 
of all friendship. You must not wait for someone 
to love you. Herein is love, not that your friend 


LONELY PEOPLE 119 


loved you first, but that you loved him. You 
have experience of such kind of love from your 
parents, from your friends. Nurses often have 
it for their little charges; teachers often have it 
for their pupils. Their love is given without 
waiting for a return, without measuring whether 
the child is able to give them a return equal to 
the value of their love. That their love goes out 
to them—herein islove. That calculating, careful 
love which considers whether a person is worthy 
of your friendship, weighs them up, says, Such 
a one is not good enough for me to love, is not 
love. Love hates ‘‘the lore of nicely calculated 
less and more.”’ 

Christ has been called the Great Solitary, and 
in this sense he was solitary, that no one was 
worthy of his friendship; that he gave to all his 
friends something better than they could give to 
him; a more perfect understanding, a more lovely 
justice, a more entire constancy. Yet it is true 
that in another sense he was not solitary at all. 
For he had friends, a circle of friends, and an 
inner circle of friends, people for whom he had a 
personal love as well as all the love that he gave 
to all the world. He taught us by his attitude 
towards the outcast, the publican and the sinner, 
the socially despised, the morally worthless or 
apparently worthless, the Gentile—he taught us 
by his attitude to all to feel reverence for everyone 
who is willing to love. With what respect he 


120 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


treated their affection and their loyalty! With 
what a friendship he lived on terms with his 
friends! How little, in proportion, have any of us 
to give! If he did not ask whether these people 
were worthy of his friendship, how is it possible 
for us who have so little love to give, to ask it? 
So little time, so little understanding, so little 
patience! I sometimes wonder, do not you? that 
we have any friends at all. I suppose at the end 
of one’s life the thing that will strike most of us 
most of all is the much that our friends did for us 
and the little that we were able to do for them. 
I cannot believe there can be anyone in the world 
who has had friends who is not continually struck 
with the enormous debt that he owesthem. ‘They 
set you right with life. They enable you to be 
yourself. Is it not enough? Is it not much? . 
What more should you ask from them than that 
most precious and lovely gift—that they enable 
you to be on terms with life? That, any friend 
can give you, and then, beyond that, your friend 
also, perhaps, is on terms with life because of 
you, and able to use gifts that you did not suspect 
were there, and to blossom out into happiness and 
usefulness; and all those things are happiness to 
you. 

In a sense it is true that all of us are lonely. 
Putting aside that loneliness which comes of a 
stubborn refusal to give oneself it does happen to 
everyone sometimes to feel lonely. 


LONELY PEOPLE 121 


I pass away now from that terrible permanent 
loneliness of which I have chiefly spoken, and 
before I stop let me say one word about that kind 
of loneliness which comes to everyone, because 
all of us are a little egotistical and therefore, all 
of us make our friends feel lonely sometimes. All 
of us. The One who was the best Friend in the 
world, Christ himself, was made to feel lonely 
sometimes by lack of understanding and egotism, 
and what is true of him is true of us, only that we 
also in our turn make our friends sometimes feel 
lonely. I do not know whether it is possible for 
me to convey to you in any language that ex- 
perience, the unspeakable happiness of feeling 
that God is your friend. I mean in a personal 
sense—I mean God as you see him in Jesus Christ. 
But I think those who do not know it might a 
little imagine it, if they could realise that we 
believe there is a personal living relationship with 
Someone who is always just. The trouble with 
introspective people is that first of all they think 
you have not been just to them, and then they 
think that perhaps they have deceived you. 
Sometimes I can remember going to see somebody 
on whom I desired to make a good impression. 
I did not realise that that was what I desired but 
I can see now that I did. When I went away 
from that interview, I used to go over every 
word I had said and wonder how it had affected 
them, and was very often miserable about it, 


122 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


and reflected that I really had not done myself 
justice! That kind of attitude is devastating to 
the spirit, is it not? There is no peace to that 
kind of mind except to know that you have a 
Friend—I put it in the simplest language—who 
is never deceived by you, who is never “‘bluffed”’ 
by you, who is never mistaken in you, but is 
always absolutely and perfectly just to you, who 
do not even know how to be just to yourself. 
That is a happiness which does not indeed wholly 
destroy a loneliness which must sometimes come 
to all of us, but it makes it seem quite a little 
thing. There are people to whom that hymn, 
which to some of you must have seemed a strange 
one, is literally true:— 


Jesu, the very thought of Thee 
With sweetness fills my breast, 

But sweeter far Thy Face to see, 
And in Thy Presence rest. 


No voice can sing, no heart can frame, 
Nor can the memory find 

A sweeter sound than Jesu’s Name, 
The Saviour of mankind. 


O Hope of every contrite heart, 
O Joy of all the meek, 

To those who ask how kind Thou art, 
How good to those who seek! 


LONELY PEOPLE 123 


But what to those who find? Ah! this 
Nor tongue nor pen can show; 

The love of Jesus, what it is 
None but his loved ones know. 


Well, but we are all his loved ones. I should 
rather have said ‘‘None but his lovers know.” 
And this also I say to those whose difficulty is 
not that they have so few friends but so many, so 
few interests but so many (I know there are many 
of you here in this Guildhouse): when you feel 
that all has been drained out of you, that you 
have neither time, nor strength, nor perhaps even 
love to give any more because the world has 
taken out of you all that you had to give, to be in 
communion with God, to be in personal com- 
munion with Jesus Christ, is to be filled again 
with all that the world needs, with that divine 
love which your friends desire of you, to become 
like a conduit pipe through whom the love of 
God flows, instead of your empty, weary, shrivelled 
little self. 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 


A LITTLE while ago I said in the course of 

a sermon that it was a very evil thing to 
try to set a good example, and I felt at the time 
that I must not leave it just there; for I feel very 
strongly that it is an easy little pitfall to fall into, 
and few of us wholly escape it. It really involves 
the value of reality, and perhaps one of the easiest 
ways to fall into a contempt for reality is the 
habit—so deplorably common among religious 
people—of trying to set a good example. 

Why is it rather detestable to set a good ex- 
ample? I believe that, however surprised you 
may be to hear it put like that, in your hearts 
you do resent it, when you meet it. If you are 
conscious that somebody is doing something on 
purpose to set you a good example, you do not 
like it, do you? It gives a certain chill to your 
feelings about that person? I feel very strongly 
the truth of this in reading the Gospels. For the 
most part, our Lord’s words and acts are set forth 
with such extraordinary simplicity, a simplicity 
that has sometimes prevented people from per- 
ceiving the wonderful literary beauty of what is 

124 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 125 


set down. It is simple; but there is in that 
simplicity an appeal which comes from the fact 
that our Lord’s words and actions and thoughts 
were so single-minded, so sincere, that when there 
is even a suggestion of insincerity, I do not think 
it is possible to avoid feeling a certain chill. The 
picture that is given of our Lord in the first 
three Gospels is so irresistibly attractive that no 
one who has read them with a detached mind 
can fail to be attracted by the Person there 
depicted. But unfortunately it is constantly 
said to people who are not Christians—thinking 
and inquiring people—that the Fourth Gospel 
is the greatest of all the Gospels, and therefore 
they very often turn first to the Fourth Gospel, 
and are sometimes not attracted, but repelled. 
I think the reason is partly this—there are other 
reasons, but partly it is this—that the fourth 
Evangelist was so anxious to draw out the under- 
lying significance of what our Lord taught, and 
said, that he sometimes seemed to make our Lord 
acta part. I cannot put it in any other way than 
that, but here is an instance. When our Lord 
was standing at the grave of Lazarus, we are 
told that he prayed. 


Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank 
thee that thou has heard me. 

And I knew that thou hearest me always; but be- 
cause of the people which stand by I said it, that 
they may believe that thou hast sent me. 


126 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


Any of you who has ever read that chapter aloud, 
as many of you must have done, must have been 
conscious of the sudden shock of that extraordi- 
nary statement, ‘‘I knew that thou hearest me 
always; but because of the people which stand by I 
said 1t.”” 

I do not think there can be a moment’s doubt 
that the Evangelist himself interpolated or put 
into our Lord’s mouth these words, because he 
wanted to bring home to us the extraordinary 
significance of our Lord’s prayer. There was 
no desire to deceive. St. John, or whoever was 
the author of this Gospel, was not writing a 
historical record, but a theological or philosophical 
treatise, and he wanted to bring out the signifi- 
cance of our Lord’s words. We who read it to- 
day as though it were history and accurately 
descriptive of what happened, are, whether 
consciously or insensibly, repelled at the sug- 
gestion that our Lord actually prayed aloud in 
order to create a certain effect on the minds of 
those who stood by. One knows, of course, that 
it could not have been so. 

Then, again, no Gospel gives so much space to 
the last evening of our Lord’s life on earth with 
his friends, the Thursday before Good Friday, 
when he was sitting with them, sharing his last 
hours with them, and talking to them with such 
intimacy and such sacred and beautiful friend- 
ship. Some of the most lovely and touching, as 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 127 


well as some of the most glorious sayings are found 
in those chapters in St. John, which give us our 
Lord’s discourses to his disciples on that last 
evening. Then there comes the lovely scene of 
our Lord girding himself with a towel, and taking 
water and a basin to wash his disciples’ feet. 
To wash one’s feet was, in the east, a common 
usage, a common ceremony, constantly per- 
formed. During the day people walked the dusty 
roads of Palestine with bare sandalled feet, and 
to wash the feet was at once a necessary and 
ceremonious act. Our Lord did this service for 
his disciples, and then (the Evangelist goes on 
to say) he took off the towel that he had girded 
round him and sat down, and said to them, ‘‘I 
have done this for you in order to set a good 
example, for as I have done this to you, so ought 
you to do it to one another.’”’ I could be almost 
certain that one of the reasons why that lovely 
scene has never taken hold of our hearts, or 
moved us as does the scene depicted in the other 
three Gospels of the Last Supper which, quite 
apart from its sacramental or ecclesiastical sig- 
nificance, so touches one to read about, is partly 
because of that chilling statement, ‘‘I do this to 
set you a good example.”’ 

Surely no one who has ever been much waited 
upon can fail to understand why our Lord did 
this! He did not do it to set a good example; 
he did it because he wanted to doit. How many 


128 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


hundreds of times must his disciples have washed 
his feet! How they must have loved to do it, 
perhaps with a kind of competing between them 
as to which of them should be allowed the honour 
of washing the dust from those strong, swift feet, 
which went everywhere about the hills and roads 
of Palestine, bringing news of peace, bringing 
health and life and beauty. It must have been a 
heavenly thing to do such a service for our Lord. 
You who have had such services done to you—and 
which of us has not sometimes, when we are ill or 
old or tired—do you not know how, sometimes, 
when the one who has looked after you is tired, 
it is a delight to say, ‘“Now you sit down, and 
let me look after you.’’ A wife, perhaps, who 
has always been waited on by her husband, will 
say, ‘‘Now you are tired, sit down. I will wait 
on you.’ Or it may be the other way about. 
But it is so instinctive, so human, and so dear to 
do these little material services for people. I am 
certain our Lord must have been moved by some 
such impulse. He knew that the time was 
drawing very short. The friends who had so 
often waited upon him would not be able to do 
so much longer. Now, he said, for this once 
let me wait upon you. And all the grace is lost 
if we think that his object in doing it was simply 
to teach them a lesson. It is well to be taught 
lessons sometimes, I know, but the lesson is 
singularly ungracious in its effect when it takes 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 129 


the form of an apparently friendly act, and 
instead of winning, it repels us and so fails to 
achieve the thing it aimed at. 

Look at the facts. You do a thing in order to 
set a good example; that is to say, in order to 
make other people do it. But to make other 
people do a thing, you must make them in love 
with the doing of it. You must make them 
desire to do it. Now, if they think you do it in 
order to create that effect upon them, they are 
merely exasperated. It takes a very holy soul 
to be attracted by a deliberately set good example. 
Most of us are repelled. Nor does it seem possible 
to believe that our Lord ever did this, because 
there was such an extraordinary directness of 
purpose in all that he did. He did everything 
he did because it was a thing that seemed to him 
worth doing; not with some ulterior object, not 
in order to get a good effect, or to create any 
kind of effect at all, he never did anything just to 
shock people, or just to please people. He taught 
us in parable after parable, in saying after saying, 
in act after act, the beauty and the worth of 
single-mindedness. That is really what the 
loveliest of all the beatitudes means. ‘‘Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” 
It does not mean physical chastity. It means 
singleness of mind—that singleness of mind 
which is so marked a quality in children and 
must, I think, be one of the reasons why our 


130 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


Lord told us to ‘‘become as little children.” A 
child’s absorption in the thing that it is doing is 
amazing. It is a power that most of us lose as 
we grow up. Genius keeps it but most of us 
lose it, and it is a quality most dear to Christ. 
I have known a little boy of six who stood in a 
queue for one and a quarter hours in order to 
ride for two minutes on an elephant in the Zoo. 
At intervals of a quarter of an hour we went and 
asked him if he would not like to go away and 
ride on a camel or a llama instead; but no, he 
would not, and I believe if he had had to stand 
six hours he would have done it. There is a 
power of absorption in a child’s mind when it is 
really concentrated on what it is doing, which is 
part of its charm. Real singleness of mind is a 
very lovable characteristic. 

How constant it wasin our Lord. His disciples 
were plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath Day, 
and the Pharisees appealed to our Lord to rebuke 
them because it was against their law. If there 
had been a shadow of double-mindedness in our 
Lord, if he had ever thought it a good thing to 
try to set a good example, he would surely have 
said to his disciples, ‘‘Now this is a very unim- 
portant thing. It cannot possibly matter to you 
whether you pluck these ears of corn or not. 
Meanwhile, you are giving offence to some sin- 
cerely religious people. Therefore do not do 
it.’ What would have been the consequence? 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 131 


He would have created the impression that he 
really believed that God cared whether they 
plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath Day or not. 
He would have given his formal adhesion to an 
idea of God which was dishonourable, narrow, and 
contemptible. He would really, although the 
matter seemed such a little thing, have undone 
his own work, for he came to reveal God in all 
his glory, his grace, his spaciousness, his freedom, 
and if he had sought for a moment—in order 
not to give offence—to ‘‘set a good example’’ to 
others, because after all it zs good to keep the 
Sabbath Day holy—if he had said, ‘‘Refrain from 
doing this thing,” it would really at the back of 
it have meant that he accepted the idea, and pro- 
claimed it by his action, that these infinitesimal 
trifles are a matter of concern to God. It was 
the character of God that was concerned. 

Or again, when he healed a man with a withered 
hand, he knew that people were watching to see 
whether he would do this on the Sabbath Day; 
yet he did it, and rebuked them. Might he not 
easily have waited till the next day? A man’s 
hand does not wither in a moment! The afflic- 
tion must have been slowly getting worse and 
worse for years. He might have said, ‘‘To- 
morrow I shall come and heal you,’’ and the 
Pharisees would have been left without a pretext 
for offence. But our Lord would not wait for 
twenty-four hours, he would not give to any- 


132 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


one the impression that he believed it wrong to 
do right on the Sabbath Day. He would not 
give the impression that such things are of value 
in the sight of God at all, for the Son of Man is 
Lord also of the Sabbath. 

We do not keep the Sabbath Day any longer, 
but keep Sunday instead. Saturday is not any 
longer a holy day, but Sunday is, and how many 
times I have been urged not to do this, or that, 
or the other, on Sunday because ‘‘it will cause 
you to be misunderstood.’”’ What would be the 
real misunderstanding? I tell you it would be 
the idea that I thought that God cares about 
such things; and I do not think it. I am urged 
to avoid misunderstanding, but do I not actually 
create misunderstanding if I do what does not 
seem to me, in itself, a thing: worth while, in case 
some of you should think that it was not im- 
portant to have one day of rest and spiritual 
refreshment in a week? I do think it important. 
I think it very important. Well, now, if I drive 
my motor car on Sunday, shall I be setting a bad 
example to all of you? Yes? Well, I set it 
every Sunday: I tell you frankly. Every Sunday 
I set it, because I do not really think that God 
would rather have me walk from Hampstead to 
Victoria or go ina bus oratube. I do not think 
these things matter. What matters is that we 
. should take sufficient time in our lives to be 
sometimes consciously in the presence of God, 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 133 


to have spiritual leisure. That is important, and 
certainly one day in seven is not by any means 
too much, and everyone should have that. But 
to do a thing that I myself think is of no impor- 
tance in order to persuade you that it is a thing of 
importance, is dishonest. 

Or again, our Lord shocked public opinion by 
sending away without condemnation a woman 
who was taken in adultery. They brought her 
to him and asked, ‘‘What do you think of this? 
What is your opinion? What do you say about 
it?’? You may be asked such a thing some day. 
You perhaps, some of you who are in a public 
position. All of you at least have some circle 
of friends or relations to whom what you do may 
be of weight, to whom your position on a given 
matter counts for something. Somebody says 
to you, Here are two people who live together, 
without being married. You ask about their 
circumstances, and you find that they are doing 
what they, at least, believe to be right. You 
find that, in your own judgment of them, you— 
I speak for myself at the moment—think they 
are doing wrong. It'is true that you know also 
a hundred things that are more wrong, but these 
are condoned by public opinion. You admit to 
your family circle someone who is cruel, who is 
mean, who is spiteful, who is disloyal, a coward, . 
a skunk and a shirker, because public opinion has 
decided that these things do not matter very 


134 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


much. You exclude from your circle, although 
not because of your moral judgment, these others, 
not because they are worse, but because the 
world’s judgment has decided that they are worse, 
and if you admit them to your acquaintance, you 
may be ‘‘misjudged.’”” You may be held to think 
that these things are of no importance, and you 
know that they are important. Perhaps you 
hold them tremendously important. Perhaps 
they are far more sacred to you than to some of 
those who judge you. And you argue with 
yourself, ‘‘I must not make it seem as though 
I did not think they were important.” Well, 
and what about all those people who are cruel, 
and mean, and spiteful? You are not afraid to 
make these vices seem unimportant! You admit 
these people to your house, to your acquaintance! 
Are you not afraid sometimes that you are re- 
versing the moral judgment of Christ? How 
easy it is for us now to read that lovely story in the 
eighth chapter of St. John! How easy to sen- 
timentalise over it, and think how wonderful our 
Lord was, how gracious, and how courteous to 
this woman; and how shocked and scandalised 
were the people outside, the Pharisees and the 
others, how hateful they were, how mean and 
cruel! I do not know any chapter in the Bible, 
any passage in the Bible, that is more sentimen- 
talised over than that little passage in St. John. 
You know, do you not, that it does not belong 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 135 


there at all. It is not part of the Gospel according 
to St. John. It is thought that very likely it is 
really part of St. Luke, and has got in there by 
mistake. But anyone will tell you, even the 
most advanced critic, that it is a true story—an 
authentic record. It bears its truth upon its 
face, no one but Christ could have acted so. No 
one could have invented it. It is the very soul 
and spirit of Christ. It is so glorious and so 
lovely that Christ probably was told that he 
would be liable to be misunderstood. Should he 
not have joined in the condemnation of the world, 
for after all these things are condemnable? Why 
should our Lord lay himself open to the charge of 
thinking that he did not hold adultery to be a 
great sin? He did think it was a great sin. I 
think to one so loyal, so selfless, so glorious, it 
must have seemed a very great sin indeed. But 
what then? It was a less sin than the hateful 
cruelty, the prurient curiosity, of those who 
accused her, and he was not going, for anybody’s 
sake, or for any consideration, to reverse his own 
standard of values. To him the cruelty and the 
meanness of the Pharisees who brought her 
there was worse than her conduct. Very well, he 
would let them see it. He would run the risk of 
being misunderstood. He would not do anything 
to conform to the world’s standard unless it was 
truly his standard. In all that he did he was 
absolutely true to himself, so true that we can 


136 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


see nineteen hundred years afterwards, that that 
little episode is true, although nobody will ever 
know who wrote it; because it belongs to the 
mind of the man of whom it was written. 

We are all of us, in whatever situation we find 
ourselves, constantly tempted to act from double 
motives. Sometimes we say we are doing it to 
set a good example, when what we really mean, 
if we spoke the truth, is that we have not got the 
courage to set what the world will call a bad 
example. We have no moral courage, and so 
we do a thing which isdishonest. It is this setting 
a good example, doing what we do not really think 
is worth while, in order that somebody else may 
think it worth while, that corrupts our honesty, 
and so rots our very minds, that we do not even 
know what we think right, because we have not 
any moral courage. We think we did a thing to 
set a good example—to avoid causing others to 
stumble. If we were absolutely straight with 
ourselves we should see that very often that was 
not the real motive: the motive was a lack of 
moral courage. 

We accept standards that are not ours because 
we do not want people to think something else 
about us that is wrong. We do not want people 
to think we think certain things are unimportant, 
and therefore we allow ourselves to act as though 
they were the most important things of all; and 
in that we deceive not only other people, which 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 137 


is bad enough, but often ourselves too, which 
is worse. 

Much of our work is wasted and spoiled because 
its apparent motive is not its realone. I remem- 
ber a flourishing debating society that used to be 
held on Sunday afternoons in a poor part of East 
London. It was part of the work of a settlement. 
After awhile, the head of the settlement gave 
it up. People asked why, because it was a very 
good and flourishing debating society and did 
very interesting work. He said, ‘‘Because it 
did not lead to anything.’ And people said, 
““To what should it lead?’’ He replied that it 
had not led to any of them coming forward to be 
confirmed! That is a kind of double motive that 
is detestable. If you think it is a good thing to 
hold a debating society, hold a debating society, 
but do not hold it because it is going to lead to 
something else. Do not hold it because it will 
cause people to come to your church or to lend 
themselves to some end of which they had not an 
idea when they first came to it. I do not know 
of anything that has made organised religion 
more stink in people’s nostrils than this double ~ 
motive, this habit of doing a thing, not because 
it is worth doing, but because it may bring people 
to go to church. Let them go to church if they 
want to, or if you have anything on earth to 
offer to them when they come; but not because 
they have been led on step by step, doing things 


138 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


that you did not really think were worth while in 
themselves. 

If you do welfare work because you think it 
will keep the working classes quiet, it is much 
better not to do it. You will only arouse resent- 
ment. If you do it because you really desire 
their welfare, they will be conscious of that too; 
but if you do it from a double motive, or an undis- 
closed motive, the work is destroyed. 

I often think half the complaints that we make 
about ingratitude are really due to the fact that 
our motives are much less noble than we imagine. 
Half the time we do kind things to preserve our 
own self-respect. We cannot respect ourselves, 
if we do not sometimes do a kind action. Well, 
then, you have preserved your self-respect! 
‘Verily I say unto you, ye have your reward.” 
Why do you expect gratitude on the top of that? 
Why should people be grateful for such kindness? 
You did not do it for their sake! You did it 
because you could not keep your self-respect if 
you did not do it. There are men who pray, our 
Lord says, standing at the street corners, that 
they may be seen of men. ‘‘Verily I say unto 
you, they have their reward.’”’ They did it that 
they might be seen, and they were seen. That is 
the thing that they wanted. Do they expect an 
answer to their prayer as well? Why, being 
seen was the answer. And so, in the things that 
we do to one another, very often if we probe 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 139 


ourselves, we find that we are doing a certain 
thing because we have made a picture of ourselves, 
or our families have made a picture of us, or our 
friends, and we want to play up to it. We think, 
“‘T am a generous and impulsive person,” and so 
we do generous and impulsive things. It would 
be a pity to have such a character and not play 
up to it! It is horrible to think how often one 
plays up to the part other people have invented 
for one, or we have invented for ourselves. Verily 
we have our reward. What more do we want? 
There is no more subtle means of deterioration 
than to be always acting up to someone else’s 
standards, always acting with a double motive, 
always pretending to be or think something which 
really we are not and do not think. Do you 
retnember a passage in Mr. H. G. Wells’ ‘‘The 
Soul of a Bishop,’’ where the bishop was just 
going to lose his connection at a station, and 
there were a crowd of people between him and 
his train, and he wanted to push and shove, but 
he did not, because he knew it ‘“‘would not do” 
for a bishop to push and shove. Have you not 
done things like that a dozen times? It would 
not do for you not to play up to the part that 
you are dressed up to! Of course, the unhappy 
bishop is always dressed up to his part and never 
gets a holiday. But you also are dressed up to 
your part, and often do these things unconsciously. 
You only suddenly realise—perhaps when it is 


1440 ~=SLIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


too late—that you were not doing them because 
they are or seem to you worth doing. You did 
not refrain from pushing people because you 
truly, earnestly dislike pushing them, but because 
it ‘‘would not do”’ for you to doit. And all the 
time you know, everybody knows, that the only 
thing in the world that carries any weight at all 
is reality; that reality is the only thing that 
makes any difference at all. All these things 
that we do for ulterior motives have no effect at 
all in the world, except this—that they sap our 
courage and our integrity, so that at last we do 
not know what we are or what we aim at. 

If this sounds very desperate—for if we try to 
analyse our motives for doing anything, we are 
reduced almost to despair at the difficulty of 
ever acting from an absolutely pure motive— 
let us take comfort again. It is not a counsel 
of despair. It is a counsel of hope. What is 
honest in us does tell. It counts so surely and 
so certainly that we need not worry about any- 
thing else. It is the only thing in the world 
that tells in the end, and it is so certain that it 
does tell—that if there is one spark of honest 
thought in the mind of anyone here it will tell, 
will help, will save not only you but others, that 
you need not worry any more about whether 
people misunderstand you or not; you need not 
worry about the effect you are making in the 
world. It is like going into the open air to realise 


ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 141 


that we need not worry about all that; that what 
we need to worry about is only our own honesty; 
that if we are honest we need not worry about 
whether what we do is going to be properly under- 
stood or rightly judged. Whatever is real in us 
is going to tell—and nothing else. 

Suppose you are misunderstood by your own 
family or your friends. Suppose the things that 
you have tried to do best and noblest have been 
attributed to some mean motive. Suppose your 
world does not understand you. Suppose that 
you are trying and agonising to do better and 
people try to keep you in the old rut because 
they have always seen you there and do not 
believe you are ever going to come out. Suppose 
all the misunderstanding that you like. It does 
not matter. The world cannot imprison you in 
these misunderstandings. It cannot. Whatever 
is real in yourself is bound to win through, bound 
to tell, and it is a relief to the very soul to know 
that, after all, ‘‘only the Master can praise us, 
and only the Master can blame,’’ that we have 
only one standard that matters, and that in pro- 
portion as we satisfy it we do ‘‘count”’ while all 
the rest passes and does not matter. There is 
only one way to avoid being either a hypocrite 
or a prig, I think, and that is to measure ourselves 
continually against the standard of Christ, which 
was so adequate, so perfect, so true. Do not 
mind if in the world’s judgment you are con- 


142 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


demned or misunderstood. Do not mind even 
if you must condemn yourself, but measure your- 
self against the standard of Christ, and in doing 
that you will be saved both from self-complacency 
and from despair, for you will know that what- 
ever of reality there is in you, that our Lord can 
use and will use in the service of God. 


ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 


| PY ean the next few days all properly con- 

stituted people will be engaged in making 
good resolutions. I say all properly constituted 
people, because the only ones who do not make 
good resolutions before New Year’s Day are lazy 
people who think they have got far enough, or 
anyhow are not going any further, and who are 
mostly found among the old; cynical people who 
remind us that the way to hell is paved with good 
resolutions, and who are often found among the 
young; and prosaic people who point out that as 
a matter of fact nothing particular happens on 
December 31st—that this date is a purely artificial 
way of marking the passage of time; that it is 
quite as germane to make good resolutions on 
April 1st as on December 31st. But the rest of 
us—and let us hope the rest of us are in the 
majority—really do make good resolutions on 
every December 31st, and on January Ist we 
make a fresh start. 

If you are not one of that majority I want you 
to join it to-night. For we are not as nice as 
we might be. We might all be better than we 

143 


144. LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


are! That is true of all of us, even the saints, 
even the pleasantest and the most lovable. We 
all might be a little bit better than we are. We 
could all begin to be so now, for no one is too old 
to start, and we have all got to arrive some day 
at the idea that God has for us. It is no use 
thinking we shall be let off—at least I think not. 
I think the idea that God sometimes in the end 
gives us up is a lazy delusion. It is far more 
terrifying in a sense to realise that God will never 
give us up, and that if we do not make a fresh 
start at the end of this year the time will come 
when we shall have to make a fresh start, and 
the longer we put it off the further we shall have 
to go. That God of ours, who has been so won- 
derfully described by a great poet as the ‘‘Hound 
of Heaven,’ will never cease to pursue us. 
‘‘Though I go down into hell thou art there also.”’ 
And so through other states and other lives, 
perhaps, God will pursue us until we do decide to 
make a fresh start. 

Why not now? Perhaps because there is a 
sneaking fear in our hearts—not only of the 
cynic, the lazy, and the prosaic, but in all of us— 
a little dread of making good resolutions because 
our minds go mournfully back to December 3Ist, 
1923—1922—1921I—as far back as we can re- 
member—and, without being cynics, we cannot 
help wondering whether it is really worth while. 
We made such a deplorable mess of our resolutions 


-ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 145 


last time, and making them once more only 
reminds us what failures we made before. 

Then, also, at the back of our minds is a feeling 
that it is very difficult for us to start again. - 
There are so many things in our lives over which 
we have no control, which make it very difficult 
for us to be as nice as we really feel we might be. 
We let ourselves off, in our minds, because we 
reflect—and often quite justly—that there are 
many things which we cannot help, things outside 
ourselves; or if they are within us, we did not 
put them there! And these things make it 
extremely difficult for us to be hopeful about 
making a fresh start. I remember being struck 
with the fact that the teaching of psychology, 
especially when it is only rather crudely under- 
stood, sometimes encourages people in that 
hopelessness. Everything that they do wrong, 
everything that is disagreeable and difficult in 
their natures, is referred back to something that 
happened to them a long time ago, so long ago 
that they cannot be held responsible for it; some- 
thing done to them by people who had charge of 
them when little. If your psychology stops there 
(as, with some people, it unfortunately does), 
it does make you feel you cannot really be any 
better. You cannot undo the past, you cannot 
eliminate the things that happened to you long 
ago, for which you are paying now, not through 
your fault. Therefore it seems as though you 


146 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


might let yourself off the effort of trying to be a 
little nicer. I remember a boy who was told that 
all his difficulties arose from the way in which 
his parents had handled him when he was a child. 
He felt profoundly resentful against them. But 
it never seems to have occurred to him that his 
father, who was the chief offender according to 
the psycho-analyst, had very likely himself suf- 
fered from precisely the same mishandling when 
he was a child. I never saw two people more 
alike than that father and son! If therefore the 
son was what he was because his father had mis- 
handled him, it is at least possible that his father 
was what he was because his father had mis- 
handled him! In that case we are all in a vicious 
circle, unless all that has been done to and in- 
flicted upon us by older people can be redeemed; 
unless it is possible for the individual to make a 
fresh start in spite of all. The vicious circle will 
go on for ever, from father to son, from generation 
to generation and, although we may learn to bea 
little more merciful in our judgment of one 
another, we are not really helped to make a fresh 
start. 

In order to do that, we must understand where 
we now are, and cease to dwell with mournful 
insistence on what we were. What we were is 
no place to start from. We have to start, if we 
start at all, from where we are. 

Two men lost their way in Ireland and asked 


ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 147 


an Irishman to tell them the way to Dublin. He 
said, “If it was to Dublin I was going it would 
not be from here I would be starting.’’ That is 
often our answer to the difficulties of life! We 
continually try to start not from where we are, 
but from where we are not, and when we fail we 
do not realise that it is because we do not take 
the situation exactly as it is now and start from 
there, but think to ourselves, “‘If I were going to 
heaven it is not these parents I would have chosen. 
If I were going to be good, attractive and lovable, 
it is not with this family, in this home, in this job, 
with this disagreeable set of people I would have 
started.”” But we can only start from where we 
are! Therefore we must take our situation as it 
stands, with all our parents’ imperfections on 
their heads, and all our imperfections on our 
heads, and all the difficulties of work, family, 
surroundings, temperament, ancestors, and every- 
thing else we should have chosen otherwise—start 
with the whole set complete! That is what is 
meant by starting from where you are. Where 
you are is the only moment of time and the only 
foot of space you have really got for certain. It 
is the one firm place from which you can jump, 
and the best jumper in the world cannot jump 
from anywhere but where he stands. That is 
what most of us on New Year’s Eve forget. We 
think we could make good if people had not made 
such a mess of our surroundings, and we do not 


148 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


realise that this involves us in a vicious circle, 
for unless the individual is sufficiently master of 
himself and his circumstances to take them all 
and yet to make a fine life of it, the world will 
never be an inch further on than it is now. 

Let us begin by being a little kinder to each 
other. ‘‘Who art thou that judgest thy brother? 
To his own Master he stands or falls, and he shall 
stand, for the Master has power to make him 
stand.” With all the unkind and cruel things 
people have done to you, there are also some kind 
things you might have done and did not. As you 
were wronged and resented it, and feel that 
you can never escape from the injury so done to 
you, because it has cramped your very soul, so 
may you cramp, or not cramp, the souls of other 
people. If society has wronged you, given you 
the wrong work, taken away your vocation, done 
anything evil to you, do not you make common 
cause with all that wrong by doing the same to 
other people. We might take human kindness 
a little less for granted than we do. We take so 
much for granted. 

And do not start from what other people 
expect of you. They do not know you, after all. 
Start from what God expects of you. We are 
told so often—and it is true—that most people 
react to what is expected of them. Almost all 
of us are, very largely, what people around us 
expect us to be. Suppose they do not expect 


ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 149 


much of us? How shall we rise above that? 
Why, think what God expects of you! ‘‘Be ye 
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is 
in heaven is perfect.’’ The great expectation of 
God, which some day you will have to meet— 
fix your mind on that. For it is true that we 
are what is expected of us, and if we turn away 
our wandering eyes always seeking the judgment 
of man, and fix them on God, we shall find an 
expectation, a divine waiting and patience for 
us to be some glorious thing. God knows what 
we are capable of. He knows us better than 
anyone else can. God expected the return of 
the prodigal son when anyone else would have 
given him up. God, in the person of our Lord, 
said to the woman taken in adultery, not only 
‘‘Neither do I condemn thee,”’ but ‘‘Go and sin 
no more.” Was that not divine? ‘‘Neither do 
I condemn thee’; but more glorious still that 
last, ‘‘Go and sin no more.” Put yourself in 
her place if you can, and think how difficult it 
was for her to ‘‘sin no more.” A woman who 
has sinned in such a sense, and who is known so 
to have sinned, is thrust out of society in a way 
which it is probably impossible for us to realise 
unless it has happened to us. Perhaps some 
of those who spend their lives in trying to help 
such women understand it. Even now, when 
moral standards are supposed to be laxer—when 
there is at least a gentler attitude towards such 


150 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


women—even now it is extraordinary how, when 
once a woman is publicly branded as a sinner, she 
will be pushed right outside the world, as though 
she were something incapable of human society, 
no longer human, a person who has lost her rights, 
fair game for any licentious.man. ‘This is the 
origin of that fable that a woman never recovers 
from such a fall; the world has taken care that 
she does not recover! 

This woman, then, among the Jews, who drew 
a very hard line between the virtuous and the 
unvirtuous, this woman has been taken in adul- 
tery, in the very act, and surrounded by a crowd 
of men she is brought through the streets and 
set there before the Master for sentence. He 
says, ‘“Go and sin no more.’’ Might she not 
well ask, ‘“‘How is that possible? How can I 
live at all when I am an outcast from society, 
when all the world knows what I have done? 
That I have done the thing that in a woman is 
unforgivable? How is it possible for me to sin 
no more? ‘There is no other way of life open to 
me.’’ And yet that story bears on its face the 
mark of its divine origin. No one but Christ 
could have said a thing so lovely and sublime. 
With the absence of condemnation is the expec- 
tation of a virtue which must in the future be 
heroic, ‘‘Go and sin no more.’’ If it was possible 
for her so must it be possible for all of us. There 
is not a person in the world for whom it could 


ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 151 


have been more difficult than for that woman. 
Yet God expected this heroic virtue of her, and 
expects it no less of you and me. If we have 
failed every year since we began to make good 
resolutions, if we are utterly weary of the business 
of making a fresh start, if our vices have become 
like a chain upon us, if we are slaves of big or little 
evil habits (and the little ones are often quite as 
hard to break and quite as destructive of the 
happiness of others as the big ones), still let us 
lift up our eyes from our own discouragement 
and the discouragement of others, and fix them 
upon the great expectation of God. 

If we do this for ourselves, let us also do it for 
other people. I sometimes think if Christ had 
stopped at this, ‘‘Neither do I condemn thee,”’ 
he would have been more cruel than kind. For 
there are many people who do not condemn us 
any longer for the things we do because they have 
ceased to expect anything better. We have been 
selfish, irritable, lazy, difficult, bad-tempered so 
long that they decide now to put up with us, and 
not to expect us to do better. They remind 
themselves that we have a difficult temperament, 
and that after all we have good sides to our 
character, we have good points. They will not 
ask more of us now. 

‘‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ If Christ had 
stopped there, as I say, he would have been almost 
more cruel than kind, but as he did not stop there, 


152 LIFE’S LITTLE PITFALLS 


do not you stop there either. Do not expect 
your friends to do no better. They are trying 
quite as hard as you, perhaps a great deal harder. 
Perhaps they have got a great deal further already 
than you realise, and while you are expecting 
them to walk along the same old road you are 
doing your best to keep them there. It is one 
of the most pathetic things in human nature that 
when a boy or girl, at the New Year, or on a 
birthday, or at some other time, with high resolve 
determines—what shall I say?—not to be late 
for breakfast! everyone says, ‘‘What! you punc- 
tual! What on earth has come over you?”’ Do 
you think that shy young soul will ever dare to be 
punctual again? Or if you are kind or brave— 
or anything that you have not been in the habit 
of being—what discouraging looks of surprise 
will greet you! Even if your relations (it is 
generally relations) do not say anything, they 
look it, and all the spirit goes out of you. Let 
us try not to hold other people back so. If you 
are not going to make any other good resolutions 
at all, make that one. Believe that the other 
people, not only your friends, though perhaps 
especially your friends, but all the people around 
you are really trying. Perhaps the thing we 
sneer at as another bad failure has already driven 
them almost to despair, because they had thought 
they were getting on a little better and suddenly 
they break down. If we had noticed more that 


ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS 153 


they were getting on a little better, and noticed 
less that every now and then they do break down, 
if we had shared something of that divine expec- 
tation of God for all the people around us, perhaps 
December 31st would not find them too dis- 
couraged to make any more resolutions at all. 
Do not let us be cynical about ourselves, but also 
do not let us be cynical about other people. Let 
them also start from where they are and not 
from somewhere where we saw them years ago. 

The passing of time, the marking of the passage 
of time which we call the Old Year and the New, 
brings us into the presence of eternity. It is a 
strange paradox that these conventional periods 
and dates should bring us to eternity, but they do. 
We see things for a moment against the back- 
ground of our own immortality. We realise, if 
only for an hour, that we must awake out of sleep 
and cast from us the works of darkness, and put 
upon us the armour of light. Here and now we 
set out; let us set out for something nobler, braver, 
freer than we have been in the past. The cynics 
tell us that the way to hell is paved with good 
resolutions; they forget that the way to heaven 
has a precisely similar pavement. 





Putnam Books Dealing with the 
Religious and Social Questions 
of the Moment 


Miss Maude Royden is one of the remarkable clerical figures 
of the present age. A graduate of Oxford, she began her life’s 
work in social service among the poor of the Liverpool slums. 
Feeling the need of religion in the every day life of the citizens, 
humble or great, with whom she became familiar, she took up 
preaching, and for three years was pulpit assistant at the City 
Temple in London. She now preaches every Sunday in the 
Guildhouse, Eccleston Square, of the same great city, and her 
teachings have made their way around the world. Her books are 
read everywhere. Her creed is that of common sense tempered 
by deep religious feeling and applied in a fashion for which there 
is ange a need as there has ever been in the history of the 
world. 


MISS ROYDEN is the author of the following books:— 
Sex and Common Sense 
Prayer as a Force 
Political Christianity 


During the present year, the Putnams have brought out two 
new books by Miss Royden which are of singular interest and 
importance at this time to church going citizens. They are: 


Beauty in Religion, in which she deals with some 
new aspects of Christianity. ‘‘The assurance of God,’’ writes 
Miss Royden, ‘‘comes to most of us through beauty.” Of this 
book, the London Spectator says, ‘‘it transports us to a higher 
level and into a larger air.”’ 


And 


The Friendship of God, in which Miss Royden 


deals directly with the field she has made peculiarly her own—the 
relation of Christianity to every day life. It is a soothing book 
and one to inspire faith where doubt has once been. 


G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
New York London 





The Revelation of 
God in Nature 


By Rev. C. J. Shebbeare 


and 


Joseph McCabe 


May the beauty and harmony of nature be 
attributed to the action of a creative and pre- 
siding mind? This absorbing and always new 
question is discussed with skill and insight by 
the Chaplain to the King of England, and one 
of the foremost Rationalists of the day. The 
two authors present their respective arguments 
with dignity and thoroughness. What they have 
to say is of interest and stimulating, not alone to 
the professing Christian, but to every thinking 
man and woman, to every individual who finds 
himself perplexed by the problem of the Creator. 
There is in the book no dogma, no violence, no 
ugly self-assertion. The reader may hear both 
sides and form his own opinion. 


G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
New York London 














